Punch Club
Punch Club is a fighting management sim by Tiny Build games. And, as anyone can see, it’s positively dripping nostalgia.
Story-wise, it doesn’t take itself super seriously. Think something like Kung Fury in video game form. We’re talking ninjas, Russian super fighters, wrestlemen. I think I recall fighting a bear at one point. Ultimately, it’s about your character becoming the very best that no one ever was.
The game is filled to the brim with references to fighting-related franchises. You can find nods to Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat all over the place, as well as Double Dragon and other such titles. You’ll find more than a few references to the Rocky movies. You even fight 3/4 of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Crocodiles. It’s a crazy game, man.
Most of the early game has you desperately trying to balance workouts for your next fight with earning enough money to keep your training up. This is made tougher by random muggers showing up to beat you up and take half your money any time you’re carrying more than $140 around with you. You can fight them, but in the early game it’s easier to avoid dealing with them by simply not carrying enough to make them appear. Moreover, the crazy level of stat decay pretty much demands that you spend at least some of a day working out rather than just working. You can buy a few perks that keep a given stat from dropping beneath a certain level, but anything worth having above that level will require maintenance.
Speaking of stats, as of this writing, Agility is the most important. You really can’t expect to keep all of your stats high, so you can only realistically focus on two of the three, and chances are you’ll be smart enough to pick Agility and Stamina, since they don’t really have a downside, unlike Strength, which ups your energy usage in fights. While any build would realistically need to use a dump stat, builds without Agility are currently untenable; Strength needs Agility to be able to hit anything, and most of Stamina’s skills are, from my understanding, fairly lame in a fight.