Player Punch/Video Games/Hack and Slash

Examples of Player Punches in Hack and Slash games include:

Dark Messiah features Leanna, a young mage who's attracted to the player character Sareth. About halfway through the game she appears to be killed by the main villain Arantir. The player can do nothing to help her and can only watch, this will most likely motivate the player to absolutely tear Arantir's lair apart in a fit of rage later on. It turns out she's alive and the player can rescue her, but at this point even after rescuing her the player now has a very good reason to want to slaughter Arantir and get the good ending.
Diablo II packs a Continuity Nod Player Punch? If you've played the first game, you were attached to the town (as the game was 5% that town, 95% killing monsters underground) and some of the characters were close to your heart. In the second game, you teleport there to see the whole town burning and infested with monsters. That's the first punch. You see Deckard Cain in a cage, being tortured in every way. That's the second punch. Then... you see Griswold, the kindly blacksmith as an incredibly tough ZOMBIE, a mindless "boss" coming to get you. That right there is a very heavy punch. Just to be extra mean, there are mangled human corpses lying in the spots that every other one of the townspeople occupied in the first game, and you can even find Wirt's wooden leg (but then, nobody liked him much).
- To make it worse, Griswold is not entirely mindless. You can hear him say "kill me".
- The identity of Diablo's new host - one of the original player classes in the first game. You conquer 16 levels of dungeon to punch that demon into submission, reimprison it inside yourself by jamming the Soulstone into your head... and the damn thing stays quiet for a few weeks before simply taking over your character's body.
  - In short, nearly everybody from the first game was either killed or corrupted by demons.

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