Player Punch

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"It's a shock, you know? I mean, I knew the Sith were evil and all, but the reality of it kind of slaps you in the face." —Mission Vao, Knights of the Old Republic

There's some times when playing a Video Game can be a little dehumanizing. After all, if your character is The Faceless, then there's no cinematic depiction of his grief that his Doomed Hometown was wiped off the map. And to the player who doesn't see it except if they possibly read the instruction manual, it's not that motivating.

Enter the Player Punch. The script gives our hero a Sidekick or supporting character who is given a good degree of characterization or is just plain adorable. Over time, the player begins to take a liking to them when suddenly BAM! The villain displays a startling And Your Little Dog, Too action in killing them off (usually in a non-resurrectable Plotline Death), or worse, forcing the player to kill them by kidnapping them and turning them into a Tragic Monster. It isn't just personal now for the character. The player has been drawn into the situation because they liked Skippy the Adorable Airedale, and now that villain is going down. HARD.

Can also be utilized by making the villain into such a smug jerk that the player wants to rearrange his face, or by suddenly having a former ally commit a Face Heel Turn.

See also Death by Newbery Medal, Dropped a Bridge on Him, Stuffed Into the Fridge. MacGuffin Delivery Service is one way of doing this. Contrast Moral Myopia. Related to The Computer Shall Taunt You.

Has nothing to do with the player taking part in combat with the characters.

As a Death Trope, Spoilers ahead may be unmarked. Beware.

Examples of Player Punches are listed on these subpages:

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Examples of Player Punch include:

Video Games

Adventure Games

• The Ur Example is almost certainly from Infocom's 1983 Interactive Fiction game Planetfall. Early in the game, the hero receives a Robot Buddy named Floyd who doubles as the comic relief. Toward the end of the game, Floyd sacrifices himself to retrieve an important item. As Floyd dies, the hero cradles him in their lap and quietly sings his favorite song. The touching moment is considered a landmark in the development of video games as a narrative art form. Many players admitted to the game's designers that they were moved to tears by the scene.
• Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh when Trevor is killed right after he and Curtis confess their love for each other and are about to kiss? That bastard is going down.
  • The fact that Trevor is one of the few likeable characters in the game certainly doesn't help.
  • In his Let's Play of the game, The Spoony One comments:

"The sad thing is, I was really supporting (the Big Bad) until he killed Trevor. That bastard."

• Shannara had THREE particularly nasty Player Punches closer to the end of the game:
  • 1) At the Dragon's Teeth Mountains you meet with Allanon, your mentor throughout the entire game. After a strangely banal (for Allanon) talk you have to cross a chasm. Once you do it, the "Allanon" starts trying to kill off everyone he can, and is revealed to be the Shifter, disguised in the form of your mentor. If that wasn't sudden enough, he will injure the most lovable character in your party, Shella, to the point of near death. You then have a choice between using the elfstones to heal Shella, or finishing her sufferings by finally killing her with your sword and using the Ritual of Release to save her from becoming Brona's ghost. However, using the elfstones is a nonstandard game over.
  • 2) Just before the last area of the game, the Allanon (the real one) will reveal that the Shifter is STILL ALIVE, despite falling into a near-bottomless chasm. No matter what you do, Davio will do it and die along with the Shifter.
  • 3) A prelude to this is this: Shella and Davio die, Geeka leaves, Telsek leaves, Brendel cannot climb and you're forced to leave him—you enter the final battle alone. Then, you pull out the Sword of Shannara, the "mirror of inner truth". What it actually is, it's a long "dream sequence" where you meet up with Allanon, Brendel, Shella, Davio, and Telsek, not in that order, but I don't remember the real order. Each of them asks one of these hard-to-answer questions (like Shella's "Why did you kill me, Jak?") and you have to choose one of the four answers at the bottom. Despite the fact that you cannot lose, it's one of the most emotionally draining moments of the game.
• The Interactive Fiction game Zero Sum Game gives you an adorable sidekick named Maurice. Naturally, he must die in order for the player to win. To be specific, the player has to murder him.
• Heavy Rain is made of this. The game is specifically designed to draw you into the character's, making their suffering hit you that much harder. Noteworthy examples include:
  • Jason's death at the beginning. You know it's coming, and there's nothing you can do about it, but at the same time, you can't help but feel that if you had somehow managed to get there a little faster, you could have saved him. Compounded by the fact that rather than just seeing him in cut-scenes, you've actually played with the child.
  • Admit it, you winced when you had to make Ethan cut off his own finger.
  • Some players felt this way when they found out that Shelby is the Origami Killer.
• The outcome of the epic battle of the Big Robot Bil in The Neverhood:

Willie Trombone: Bil, hang on!

• • And if that wasn't enough, you can backtrack to the room where Willie was leaving hint messages for you and enjoy reading letters from Klogg, who even bothers to taunt you about Willie getting killed off. Ugh.
• The end of Sam and Max: The Devils Playhouse, when Max goes far beyond No One Could Survive That by exploding in deep space, taking out a few other characters. And then Momma Bosco's Hope Spot sets the player up for a one-two combo. The grueling closing credits give the player plenty of time for that to sink in.
• In the penultimate episode of Tales of Monkey Island, Lechuck kills Guybrush. The protagonist. And he does so just after Guybrush is starting to believe that Lechuck has made a genuine Heel Face Turn. And unlike practically everything else in the entire series, it isn't played at all for laughs. It's played entirely straight.
• This is the entire point of the classic Interactive Fiction game Photopia. At first the game seems overly linear, but this makes the climax all the more emotionally painful: the player realizes what's about to happen, but no command can stop it, only propel the story forward.

Fighting Games

• The first major battle in Super Smash Bros.. Brawl's Subspace Emissary mode forces you to choose who will live, between Princesses Peach and Zelda. The other gets turned into a statue, and can't be used until close to the end of the mode.
  • A more powerful Punch would be when you first encounter Master Hand in Subspace, previously the greatest force in the Smash Bros. universe, get defeated by a wave of the hand, and NOT get turned into a Trophy. He just lies there, bleeding. In a single moment, Tabuu went from some random Tron-looking guy to the most hated Nintendo character ever.
• Mortal Kombat 9 has quite a few. One of the biggest ones being Raiden's accidental killing of Liu Kang. Shao Kahn's casual murder of Kung Lao probably counts, too. And that's not even getting into the actions of the Elder Gods.

First-Person Shooters

• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption took a stab at it. Early in the game, you are introduced to fellow bounty hunters Rundas, Ghor, and Gandrayda. Upon completion of the Norion mission (and infection by Dark Samus), all three are sent to different systems. Who thought that being forced to fight the corrupted hunters, and then watch Dark Samus assimilate them when it was all said and done, was unbelievably tragic.
  • It's even worse with Rundas, considering he saved your life after you beat Ridley. Ghor isn't much better, though you'd have to read his backstory in one of his Logbook entries; he's such a good person that you can't help feeling terrible for having to put him down.
  • Made even worse by the fact that at the end Samus reflects on meeting, and then eventually killing the hunters, and you get to see all their deaths one after the other (especially Rundas'). Tragic.
  • And of course, it's implied in cutscenes that Samus is very angry at the one responsible (Dark Samus) and the player is probably feeling the same. Naturally, the ensuing Roaring Rampage of Revenge that ends with Dark Samus erased from existence along with all the Phazon in the universe is probably very satisfying for the player.
• Call of Duty 4 employs a variation: at the start of the game, in accordance with Call Of Duty tradition, the player controls two characters, a British SAS operator and an American Marine. During the Marine's segments, he and his commanding officers are established as sympathetic and heroic characters, even going so far as to risk their lives to stop and rescue a downed - and similarly sympathetic - helicopter pilot in a city where a nuclear warhead has just been discovered. The Dragon ends up detonating the warhead before either character can escape, allowing the player to experience the Marine's slow, agonizing death from radiation poisoning in first person.
  • At the end of the game, after escaping the Russian missile base and evading the Ultranationalist pursuers, the bridge gets blown up, and you get to watch as Griggs gets ventilated while trying to help you to your feet and Zakhaev executes Gaz. The wounded Captain Price slides you his sidearm, which you use to kill Zakhaev. When the cavalry arrives, you then get to watch as a medic tries to resuscitate Captain Price while you're loaded onto the helicopter. MacTavish (the "you" in this POV) does survive for the sequel but dies in Modern Warfare 3 (more on that later).
    • Modern Warfare 2 was even worse. If the death of Private Allen wasn't bad enough, the scene where Roach and Ghost are shot by Sheperd and set on fire (In Roach's case, WHILE STILL ALIVE) is like being kicked in the balls.

Shepherd: "Do you have the DSM?" Ghost: "Yes sir. Got it right here." Shepherd: "Good. That's one less loose end." (Gunshot. Gunshot.)

• • • Near the end of the game, members of Delta Company, Sandman, Grinch, and Truck, sacrifice themselves in a Siberian Diamond mine so Price and Yuri can escape. In the final level, Yuri (who you're not playing anymore) is killed by Makarov.
• Speaking of Call of Duty, Black Ops gives us the death of Dimitri Petrenko. The mighty hero of Russia, who stormed Berlin and took it from the Nazi hands, is poisoned by Nova-6 and dies with his face melting into blood, quick and yet painful. Though people who haven't played World At War won't get why this is a Player Punch, those of us who have pretty much agree with what Reznov has to say about the situation.

Reznov: "Dragovich... Kravtchenko... Steiner... All must die."

• The end of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, when Combine Advisors kill Eli Vance in front of his incapacitated daughter and the player. It'll be hard to create better marketing for Episode 3 than the desire for vengeance created by that scene.
  • Listen to Merle Dandridge getting choked up in the commentary track for an amplified Player Punch.
  • The beginning is almost as bad - at first, when you're trapped under the trailer/building and are forced to watch Alyx get impaled by the hunter.
• In The Darkness video game, Jenny's death was a brutal player punch that not only made players want to kill Paulie Franchetti, but also got him to see the titular Darkness as not just a case of Cursed with Awesome, but cursed with plain old curse. "Awww, what did they do to Jenny?" Bastard!
  • The most punch-esque part about that scene? The fact you're right there, and the Darkness is physically restraining you.
  • And all of that hatred towards Paulie Franchetti leads to a big letdown. In the comic, Paulie's death is horrid. Expectations of ripping the fat bastard apart with your darkness powers are dashed when he holes up in the top of a lighthouse and you have to simply shoot him. In a way, not even getting to make him really pay for Jenny's death is another Player Punch.
• Halo 3 does this twice; the first is when Truth kills Commander Keyes, and later when Spark fatally wounds Johnson.
  • A non-death-related version of this takes place in the level "Cortana," where Cortana, her voice audibly shaking from the brutal trauma she suffered at the Gravemind's hands, begs you to blow up High Charity. It isn't necessary from a storyline perspective, but letting Cortana get payback after what she's gone through feels damn good. "Hell Hath No Fury" indeed.
  • Halo: Reach. Where to begin? Was it Jorge's death? Or was it Kat's? Perhaps it was Carter or Emile's? Or Six's? What about that level where you attempt to escort civilian transports safely, only to see each one explode in front of you? Or possibly watching your entire fleet being blown to bits as you watch?
  • What about ODST and Reach? They both have something in common: you have to kill the innocent (and freakishly adorable) Engineers. If you've read the novels you already know that they're harmless and only interested in repairing things (one even saves Master Chief when he's in a tight situation), and if you haven't ODST reveals it anyway. And you have to slaughter them.
• BioShock (series) manages this by making the Big Bad Andrew Ryan blow up the wife and kid of Atlas, the one character who had extended a helping hand to the player. Later on, this trope really does make things personal because that whole wife and kid thing was just a lie by the real big bad, Frank Fontaine, who was just using you from the start!
  • Then you meet Andrew Ryan and he reveals your true identity, and the realization that both the player character and the player have been mindless pawns for the entire game. What's worse is, even if you replay the game knowing all this... you still can't do anything about it.
  • On a slightly more generic note, it can be utterly crushing the first time you bring down a Big Daddy and have to watch as the Little Sister it was protecting sits at its side, shaking its massive, lifeless face-dome and begging it to Please Wake Up. Even if you're doing the noble thing of not harvesting the life out of the mistreated little moppets, it really kicks you in the teeth the first time you see it.
    • Possibly the worst is the very first time you do such a thing, because what is playing in the background? None other than Lady Day singing God Bless the Child
    • Players take on the role of a Big Daddy for an Escort Mission. Protecting the Little Sisters throughout is almost impossible, and though there is no gameplay consequence, watching one die, and the subsequent guilt trip from Dr. Tenenbaum, delivers a fresh new Punch.
  • Bioshock 2 had another particularly cruel one: in Fontaine Futuristics there's a Big Daddy that looks and acts like any other one you encountered thus far, and probably the last you'll deal with. Of course, if you're playing the game normally, you kill him. Then you go loot his corpse...and you discover that said Big Daddy is Mark Meltzer, captured by Lamb and faced with the choice of being executed or becoming a Big Daddy and protecting his daughter turned Little Sister. This is particularly painful for people who followed the "Something In The Sea" ARG, which detailed Meltzer's efforts to find Rapture and rescue his kidnapped daughter. And then, in the final level, she does the same thing with Augustus Sinclair.
  • If you Harvest a little sister, the subsequent ones respond to Delta with fear, saying things like "Oh, no! Daddy's home! I-I've been good. Promise" and "You're never gonna hurt me, right?"
    • Bioshock 2 can even end with a player punch if you decide to kill Grace Holloway, Stanley Poole, and Gilbert Alexander and harvest Little Sisters. Turns out Eleanor was watching you do all this and, since her personality is being shaped by your actions, she becomes a ruthless monster, just like daddy.
• Clive Barker's Jericho has Simone Cole and Xavier Jones, who are the "smart ones" of the group. Cole is given a decent degree of characterisation over the course of the game, and, while little is revealed about Jones, he seems to have a warm, likeable personality. So, imagine utter horror when, close to the end of the game, they are mercilessly blown into bloody chunks by the main villain in a flurry of gore, and not even the squad's two healers are able to bring them back from the dead. OUCH.
• SHOGO: M.A.D. sees the likeable plump mechanic, who saved your posterior before, get killed for his troubles. Oh you are going down, evil bad guy...
  • To put it in the words of the protagonist:

Sanjuro: Ryo is going to die, and it's going to be bloody.

• In Prey, your abducted girlfriend gets attached to the body of a cybernetic spider-thing and the player is forced to kill her. She is completely conscious and aware of the happenings, but can't do a thing. This is a turning point of the story - until then, the PC only wanted to escape from the spaceship, now he wants to destroy, or to be more accurate, kill it.
• F.E.A.R. featured Alice Wade, the only genuinely good character to be involved with the evil corporation, who had prior to the game events been trying to dig up exactly what happened in the secret weapons project. You rescue her, only to have her run to try and help her dad out. Instead, you find her dead and partly eaten by the big bad, who is also her nephew.
  • F.E.A.R: Extraction Point (the expansion pack) has the player fight with the team's Demolition Expert, Holiday, for several missions. Only for him to be brutally ripped to shreds before the player's own eyes.
  • Perseus Mandate has Lieutenant Chen, who you spend most of a couple of levels with, just listening to him making small talk. Then one of the monsters drags him halfway into the floor and rips him apart, while he's conscious, struggling, and screaming for help. You can even grab his arm and try to pull him out, but all that happens is his arm rips off.
• Latest Left 4 Dead 2 downloadable content reveals Bill from the first game is dead. The characters only care about the weapon he's holding.
  • The punch cranks up to 11 with the release of The Sacrifice DLC, where you get to play out how Bill dies (or anyone else in your group but in canon, Bill is the one who dies). He sacrifices his life to restart the generator so the bridge can be fully raised, bringing the other survivors to safety away from the horde and multiple Tanks.
• Killzone 2 does it as well. Somewhere halfway through, Garza dies. He was the awesome one who you mostly teamed up with and you watched him die from a stupid bullet wound. Thank the creator there are still plenty of Helghast left to turn into bullet receptacles.
  • Not to mention that the end of the game implies that killing the leader of the Helghast will do no good, which makes just about everything you did in the game up to that point entirely pointless.
  • Which is turns into a bit of a jumping- off point for Rico, since your orders were to detain the Helghast emperor alive, and that Rico executing him is foreshadowed to be be what the conflict in Killzone 3 is over. Of course, you are kind of expecting this from Rico at this point, but it still doesn't help anything.
• Crysis 2 The player wandering through the tunnels under Grand Central and sees the sick people there, including some guy pleading to see his sick wife. The player escapes Grand Central Station when it comes under attack, with a building is about to fall on it, and the jeep is waved down by the same man, whose wife is trapped under some wreckage. The camera view keeps alternating from the people that are trying to get the woman out (as she pleads for them to hurry) to the ever-approaching building, and ultimately the jeep you're riding in is forced to leave as the building hits, crushing them all in full view of you.
• Another upcoming game promising to heavily feature this is Home Front, an FPS based on an invasion of the US by a revitalized and superpower level North Korea: the developers wanted the game to show the effects of war on civilian population. Thus, the game begins with you getting dragged by NK soldiers into a prison bus going off to who knows where and helplessly witnessing through the window soldiers executing a civilian couple in cold blood in front of their own child with the mother's last words being desperately screaming at the child not to look.
• In Singularity The death of Devlin at the end of the first mission was a bit of a shock. Any Genre Savvy person knew that it was coming, but unlike a lot of throwaway allies in FPS games, Devlin was a fairly likable guy and actually managed to be pretty useful. Then Demichev shoots him in the face without a second thought.
• Swat Four: "The Children of Tarrone" A doomsday cult plans to blow up their on compound, taking a large chunk of urban housing with them. At some point during the mission you discover they the cult members have killed all of their own children as part of their suicide ritual. This can lead to executing all of the people you just arrested, the first time you discover it.
• Battlefield 3 is absolutely chock full of them.
  • "Comrades"; Dima's squadmate Vladimir is mortally wounded by an RPG, and must be left behind. It doesn't truly become tragic till the end, though, when they find that the nuke they'd been tracking was never there to begin with, and the real bomb goes off seconds later, rendering Vladimir's sacrifice meaningless.
  • "See No Evil"; after two missions of following Jono Miller and learning of his desire to return home to his son, he gets captured by PLR forces, and is brutally executed by Solomon in a live broadcast.
  • "Rock and a Hard Place"; pushed into a battle they were unprepared for by their inept captain, Misfit 1-3 barely manages to fight off a Russian airstrike, only to find that Campo and Matkovic were killed in the crossfire.
  • "The Great Destroyer"; Blackburn's only remaining friend, Montes, manages to help him escape from captivity and confront Solomon, only to be shot dead by him before Black could finish the job.

Hack And Slash

• 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.

MMORPGs

• In the Rikti War Zone arcs of City of Heroes, Lt. Sefu Tendaji, the Longbow agent who's generally friendly toward you regardless of whatever other issues Longbow and Vanguard have, fills this role.
  • What makes it a wonderfully painful Punch isn't that he's built up nicely as a sympathetic figure, working first as an extremely useful ally and then as an honorable (if hard to defeat) enemy. It's that he isn't even killed for a good reason. He's not a threat, about to uncover the terrible secret behind the Rikti War. He's not an inspirational symbol of how enemies can team up to challenge a greater evil. No, he's killed because Nemesis is a racist. That's the point where he goes from Magnificent Bastard to Complete Monster.
  • The game gives us a new one in Issue 17: You're given a doppelganger who at first is an opponent, but then starts working with you on your missions. At the end of the arc, they're all alone fighting off dozens of clones of you while you're taking on the mastermind behind the whole mess. You win, but the fight takes its toll on your double; they stay behind to make sure the bombs they set go off, and you race to get them out... you're forcefully kicked from the mission just as you're about to reach them and everything explodes around you.
• In the Wrath of the Lich King expansion in World of Warcraft. Any player, Horde or Alliance, who has experienced it needs only to hear the words Angra'thar the Wrath Gate.
  • Less so on Horde side, though. Alliance loses Bolvar Fordragon, the benevolent regent of Stormwind, who had been in the game for more than two years and had saved the player character from being ambushed by the dragon Onyxia. Horde loses Saurfang the Younger, who, unlike his Badass father, had done nothing remarkable until the Wrath Gate.
    • Except that wasn't the only thing the Horde lost: Apart from the emotional significance of delivering the news of Saurfang the Younger's death to his father, the Horde must then confront one of their former racial leaders, Varimathras, who has been in the game since launch and even started quest lines for younger characters. The Horde falls under martial law, the Forsaken have to, well, forsake their home until Thrall, Sylvanas and Vol'jin can storm the Undercity with the player character (and any friends he/she brings) and put an end to Varimathras, removing him from the game permanently. And even after you tear one of the Horde's capitals down to cinders around the traitor's ears, you learn that it was still all for naught, and the Alliance king Varian Wrynn reignites the war that Thrall and the others have been fighting for years to prevent.
    • This is still a difficult quest line for the Alliance players who enjoy the lore and fleshed out story Blizzard has really put into this expansion. You first accompany Jaina Proudmoore on a diplomatic mission to Thrall about the events at the Wrathgate and find that both Jaina and Thrall are dedicated to creating peace and cooperation on both sides to fight Arthas. After you help Varian and Jaina reclaim the Undercity, Varian hears a warcry from Thrall for having defeated Varimathras and takes the fight on to Thrall and his soldiers. Wrynn then declares his goal to destroy the Horde once and for all. Jaina does stop him, but not before it's too late to stop the war. No specific player or NPC dies, just the hope for peace between the Horde and Alliance.
    • The Wrath Gate also has a.... different kind of Player Punch, specifically for Forsaken players. See, that bioweapon Putress is hocking at the Horde, Alliance AND Scourge? Yeah, every single Forsaken player had a hand in making that. There's a series of quests before you even leave the starting zone - called 'A New Plague', in which we assist the Royal Apothecary Society in the development of a new secret weapon(ized disease). When Putress roars DID YOU THINK WE HAD FORGOTTEN?, every single Forsaken on Azeroth went HOLY CRAP WE DID. It gets more evident once you reach Vengeance Landing and Venomspite, but it only sinks in after the Wrath Gate.
      • The entire Horde-side questline through Howling Fjord and Venomspite deals with the Forsaken apothecary's final preparations to bring this weapon to bear. If you ever did those zones, you were directly responsible for this.
    • The Wrath Gate comes back to haunt the player even further when one of the bosses in Icecrown Citadel turns out to be Deathbringer Saurfang. Yes, Arthas raised Saurfang the Younger after the Wrathgate incident to become his most powerful Death Knight and now the player has to kill him. Again. Alliance and Horde each even get their own versions of an in-game cutscene to beat the crap out of you even more:
      • Horde players are accompanied by High Overlord Saurfang -- his father—when he appears at the entrance to the Upper Spire and asks his father to join him in service to Arthas. The High Overlord responds, "My boy died at the Wrathgate. I am only here to claim his body." before charging into battle. After the battle, Saurfang kneels over his son's body and weeps before carrying it to the airship to take him to Nagrand to be placed with his mother at the ancestral burial grounds.
      • For Alliance players, when the fight is over, the High Overlord arrives to claim his son's body, only to be stopped by Muradin Bronzebeard. Muradin is about to resort to force when Jaina Proudmoore teleports herself and King Wrynn onto the scene. Considering Wrynn and Saurfang's history, when the King tells Muradin, "Stand down, Muradin. Let a grieving father pass," every single Alliance player knows exactly how much a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming this is.
  • And anyone who's played a death knight needs only to hear the words "A Special Surprise" for still another.
    • Night Elf Death Knights have it the worst out of all the races. For Night Elves, the target of the quest is their caretaker while they were still an infant. DAMN.
  • For many Horde players, if they can find her, delivering the news to Mankrik about his wife can be a sobering task.
  • For Alliance players, there's Emmy Malin. Emmy is a captain in Malygos' anti-magic army and is in charge of one of the ley line foci located in southwestern Dragonblight. Player characters have to kill her to get a ring necessary for reading and recording information stored in the focus she's guarding. When looted by an Alliance character, her corpse proves to hold a letter she had written to her father, detailing how she had been forced into serving Malygos and that she had been working from the inside to sabotage the corrupted blue dragons' plans. The questgiver tells the PCs that they shouldn't feel guilty as there was no way they could have known, and Emmy's father, an Archmage in Dalaran, even sends a letter later saying that he understands the actions taken by the PCs and forgives them . . . but damn. That's still a kick in the gut.
    • The same goes in Horde version for Ta'zinni, who had a similar backstory and of course another quest requires you to kill him as well. Converse to the Alliance equivalent, Ta'zinni's sister sends the player a letter swearing vengeance on whoever killed her brother, your exact role in his death being covered up when she was informed.
  • A Horde example at the end of the Pit of Saron instance, with the death of SpartOrcus in the middle of a Rousing Speech praising the players' triumph. The real punch isn't his death though, but rather Sylvannas's posthumous mockery of him.
  • The final battle with Arthas in Icecrown Citadel is a literal player punch for the PCs. After a long, difficult and grueling fight against The Lich King, once he reaches a certain health level, he effortlessly wipes your entire raid. He tells you that he's been waiting for you to fight your way through to him and now the most powerful heroes in Azeroth will become his most powerful Death Knights. Oops. Fortunately the spirit of his father appears to resurrect your team and assist in finally beating Arthas down.
    • Thereby turning what just about every lore fan acknowledged was Arthas being handed an Idiot Ball into a genius Xanatos Gambit.
  • The Battle of Darrowshire. While we see why the Plaguelands is called Plaguelands, finding a ghost of a little girl is a completely different thing.
  • A good Punch (though not actually tear-jerking) comes with the unbelievably long quest chain (the longest in the game) in The Storm Peaks, where you basically reinvigorate a downcast Thorim to raze hell only to find out that everything you'd done for Lok'lira the Crone, from freeing her to the end of the quest chain, was actually for Thorim's Jerkass brother Loken. It's your fault that Thorim gets captured and corrupted. It's your fault that Veranus, a noble proto-dragon broodmother and Thorim's old ally, is tortured and transformed into Razorscale. This isn't a Player Punch, so much as it's a Player Instant-Hell-Murder.
  • In the old Duskwood zone, there was a very long questline you do for a nice old man living in a shack at the edge of the woods. His requests for things like ghoul ribs, plague flowers etc. aren't really that strange considering what else this game has had you do so far. And he only wants to make wacky voodoo charms to protect himself, right? Up until he hands you a note to take to the town mayor, informing them about the horrific abomination that he's created and is about to unleash on their town. Which so you kindly helped him to build.
    • Also in Duskwood is the saga of Mortimer Ladimir, the selfless paladin who spent his entire life sacrificing for the good of others, only to be caught by despair and corruption following the death of his wife and children. Also known as Mor'Ladim, the elite-level killer revenant who will appear out of the dark mists without warning to kill your ass while you're trying to complete quests in the eerie graveyard of Raven Hill.
• In Vindictus, Ellis is a cadet who at first comes off as the "Oh I'm happy to be here" cadet for the royal army. After it's implied that the royal army was the provocation of a recently destroyed village he almost breaks at the mere thought that his ideals were not those of his army's, to the point of appearing sad for the first time. When he gets permission to examine the incident, he rushes off to the village to examine. The normally Cloudcuckoolander old man realizes just how deadly that was, and warns you that you had better get over there fast. He promptly gets brutalized and then killed when you finally catch up to him.

Platform Games

• Klonoa: Door to Phantomile has two—first, we discover that Klonoa was never a resident of the world to begin with, but is really a dream traveller destined to travel from world to world wherever danger goes, and that all of his memories of his life there were false ones implanted by his friend Huepow. Then, we have the absolutely gut-wrenching ending where Klonoa is permanently sent away from Dream Phantomile, just after Huepow tried in vain to keep him from being sucked away.
• Super Metroid did this with the Metroid larva which imprinted on Samus as its mother at the end of the second game. Its kidnapping starts the plot of Super and when we next see it outside its little case, it's been mutated to a horrendously huge size. In a rather touching scene, the giant Metroid nearly kills Samus, but suddenly backs off when it recognizes its "mother." The Metroid is later killed by Mother Brain while rescuing Samus from her near lethal wounds. Considering you're given an ungodly powerful gun as the Metroid's last sacrifice, Mother Brain probably didn't have time to process she was vaporized before you finish the monster off.
  • And on top of all this, the Metroid gives an absolutely pitiable death cry when Mother Brain blasts it. Try to find a Metroid fan who isn't affected by that sound.
  • What makes it even more of a Player Punch is that Mother Brain reactivates and starts blasting the poor Metroid with all her power, but the Metroid refuses to flee or even let go of Samus until the latter is fully healed. The Metroid's bright green shell and crimson nuclei darken gradually as the energy drain/Mother Brain assault combination slowly kills it, and any first-time player is likely screaming at the Metroid to go away before it really dies.
    • In Metroid: Other M the scene where Ridley finally makes a full appearance and Samus flashes back to when he killed her parents, it truly drives home that while Samus is an ultra-hard, unstoppable Badass, she's that way a great deal in part because her parents were brutally murdered right before her eyes when she was just a little girl.
• Sonic Adventure 2 has Robotnik apparently kill main hero Sonic, acting as a Player Punch for his sidekick Tails.
  • Emerl from Sonic Battle. They even dared to put in a Hope Spot moment before Sonic is forced to kill him. All of this because Emerl was nice to Eggman...
  • When Mephiles kills Sonic in |Sonic the Hedgehog 2006.
• Tomb Raider Underworld: Poor Alister. And as for Amelia Croft, it's a punch to both the player and Lara.
• The death of Dan at the hands of recurring villain Asha in Iji. There is a way to save him, but one you're not likely to find the first time you play the game.
  • For that matter, the death of Tasen Soldier KG111:PAIE and the rest of the surviving Tasen is fairly crushing. Three of them can, however, be saved.
• Ape Escape had the villainous albino monkey Specter kidnap and brainwash the protagonist's friend Jake (the only person who would have been directly able to help him, and considering his superior jumping ability, he would have been a big help) and pit the two against each other three times, the third time resulting in a broken arm for Jake.
• Jak 3 had that horrifying death scene with Damas. During said scene, we discover that he's Jak's father. Jak figures out right away, but Damas doesn't and he dies before he got to know the son he missed WAS Jak! Veger, YOU ARE SO GOING TO DIE! Too bad the game doesn't even give you the pleasure of beating him up; though he at least ends up humiliated.
• Bentley being crippled by Clock-La near the end of Sly Cooper 2. It's made even more heartbreaking because you have to do the standard button-mashing sequence as Murray to get him out, but no matter how hard you try, he can't be saved. It's even worse when Bentley cries for someone to pick him up and causes poor Murray to go walk the Earth for peace.
  • Also, many players came to really love Arpeggio. But when Clockla killed him...CLOCKLA WILL DIE IN THE PITS OF HELL!
• When Ignitus gets killed in The Legend of Spyro, you really start pulling out all the stops.
• In the Flash game The Company of Myself, it is strongly implied that something bad happened to the narrator's girlfriend, Kathryn. It still comes as a shock when you get to the flashback level where you have to sacrifice Kathryn to proceed.
• In Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, the Sands transform the Prince's father into a boss. Guess what happens.
  • Warrior Within: In case you didn't figure it out, that attractive woman who the Prince has been having sexual tension with for most of the game? That's the Empress of Time. And she's been trying to kill you. Oh, and you have to kill yourself. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • The Two Thrones: The Prince's father is dead, and has been so for a while.
• Can Your Pet? looks at first glance like a harmless little virtual pet game where you get to customize an adorable baby chick, feed it, shower it, play with it and so forth. The more you do with your pet, the more options get unlocked at the bottom of the screen, leading all the way up to the bicycle at the far right.. It's not a bicycle at all. Click it and the floor drops out from under your pet, sending it falling into a black void; the bicycle icon then grows huge, flips upside-down, and reveals itself to be a pair of buzzsaws that promptly process your pet Ludicrous Gibs-style into a pile of chicken parts which fall down into a can labeled with whatever name you gave your pet. And all the while this obnoxious chicken song is playing. That's right, the game tricks you into not only killing your pet, but butchering it as well. And its title is a terrible pun.
• At the very end of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter,The very world you've been working hard to save for the past three games is forced to be put to an end for the sake of keeping two characters alive in the real world.
• Mega Man X's Zero ends up being a major player punch when, true to his name, he kamikazes Vile (the planes used at Pearl Harbor were called Zeros - although this is not the origin of his name). And it also seems that X himself channels the player punch by breaking out of an electrocage, having his health refill and finally having his weapons restored.
  • The player punch feelings comes up again after defeating Vile with the conversation, and gift, that Zero will give you if you didn't get the buster upgrade.
    • By the by, if this scene is too much for someone to handle in the SNES version, do not play the PSP remake. It's much worse.
  • And the favor is eventually returned in Mega Man Zero. Elpizo destroys X's body in order to release the Dark Elf.
    • This one is worse...because Zero made it in time, but was immobilized and could only watch helplessly.
  • This scene is somewhat mirrored in Mega Man ZX, when the Big Bad takes control of Zero's ZX Expy, Girouette and forces the two of you to fight to the death. You don't get to Take a Third Option.
  • Iris. Zero's really, really pissed after this especially since he was forced to fight her. Cue Unstoppable Rage that would span the last few stages of the game. Afterwards, he even wonders if he's actually capable of saving anyone he cares for. Ouch...
• Kwolok's demise in Ori and the Will of the Wisps is widely regarded as the saddest moment in the game: just as things are getting better and the land starts to heal itself, the Big Good suddenly gets brainwashed by the Stink Spirit that nearly killed Ori earlier and forced to fight him to the death. The Stink Spirit is brutal, literally using Kwolok as a battering ram during the fight, and all you can do is attack the visibly struggling and suffering Kwolok until he snaps out of the brainwashing and crushes the Stink Spirit himself, before dying of his injuries after a last farewell to Ori.

Puzzle Games

• Stray Souls Dollhouse Story. The main character Danielle frees the clown, who promises to free Sam, who's locked in a cage, and she's just about to be reunited... when the clown pushes her in and it turns out to be a mannequin. That's pretty harsh...
• The defenseless, innocent, immobile, inanimate Companion Cube from Portal.
  • Worse (especially for players who didn't get attached to the cube, or had already given up on empathy when you have to use it to block a plasma ball) is the screams of the cheerily curious little Curiosity Core as it meets the same fate as the Companion Cube.

Ooh, what's thatYAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

• Subverted early on in Portal 2: GLaDOS crushes Wheatley, the friendly, chatty, funny little personality core that was helping you navigate to freedom through the ruins of the Enrichment Center. Being an Aperture robot, he wasn't exactly attentive to your risks, and he very suddenly pops back up in Chapter 3 to help you out again, with a cracked lense and twitching spark now and then but perfectly fine otherwise. But the real subversion kicks in when he becomes corrupt and villainous for the second half of the game, stopping your escape elevator mid-ascension. Given how he's less than compassionate even when he was helping you, his eventual fate doesn't fall into this category.
  • Played very straight with the dear old Companion Cube in Chapter 2 though, served with a hearty side of chain yanking. It's given no introduction, but players of the first game recognize it as their dear friend, and then...it disintegrates the second you pick it up. GLaDOS taunts you about it as she replaces it with a new Companion Cube, which she also destroys, so she can taunt you again with how very expendable the Cube is as she summons a third one you can actually use. Then the Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill in that chamber just-so-happens to be broken, so you can even smuggle the Companion Cube out of the chamber...only for GLaDOS to destroy it as you step in the elevator.
    • Made worse when GLaDOS says that the Companion Cubes do have a rudimentary intelligence, and aren't just inanimate objects.
  • The turrets. Oh god, the turrets. They have adorable voices, but you are often forced to kill them. As you kill them, they will say things like "I don't blame you" or "Good night" just to make you feel worse about yourself.
    • And if that isn't bad enough, look at the sequel. On the Turret Redemption Line, you can save a still-functioning turret, but if you try to take it into the next room, it disintegrates. When the defective turrets are flung into the incinerator, you can stand in front of it and save them, for which they will be joyful and say "Let's get this started! All right!" However, they explode shortly after you place them on the ground. Finally, when you switch it so the working turrets get flung into the incinerator instead of the defective ones, they shout things like, "But I did everything you aaaaaaasked!" and "WheeeeeeOH NO!" You also later get to see them in the moment they get crushed in between gears, still shouting.

Real Time Strategy

• In Sacrifice, depending on which plot branch the player follows, this can happen with Shakti (arguably the most sympathetic character in the game, including is the plot branch where the player chooses to follow the banner of Stratos: After a number of levels where the player character and Shakti collaborate, Stratos decides to break his alliance with Shakti's patron, and signal the break by having Shakti murdered - and gives the job of murdering her to the player.
• In StarCraft it's Mengsk betraying Kerrigan.
  • In Brood Wars in the Zerg missions the player has to kill Fenix.
• In the first half of Stronghold 's military campaign, the player gets to listen to the friendly banter of Sir Longarm and Lord Woolsack in-between missions. Some time later Sir Longarm has to leave so to negotiate with the captors of the king, while you and Woolsack attack the remainder traitors in two fronts(though for what reason he of all people is sent to do such a thing while the obviously inferior Woolsack gets to smash things remains a mystery). Soon after the player character learns that while his forces were preoccupied with the Wolf, Duc Truffe has defeated Woolsack's army and put him down. Having about a second for that information to sink in before the player hears the Pig boasting about how he violently tortured the old wheezer to death doesn't help much.
  • After all of this, burning his place down twice before finishing him off seems legit.

Rhythm Games

• In the Bit.Trip series, the players themselves are forced to kill CommanderVideo to beat the Recurring Boss Mingrawn Timbletot. Given that the series is a metaphor for human life, it's believed this actually is symbolic of the protagonist being Driven to Suicide.

Shoot 'Em Up

• The flash game Viricide has you slowly but surely repair EXADI, the EXtremely ADvanced Intelligence, purging viruses from her systems. Then she asks you to do "one last thing" for her, and this turns out to be the deactivation of her Emotional Core. She explains that this will remove her self-awareness, essentially AI suicide. And the game forces you to do it. The final conversation with her consists of a few lines of text indicating that EXADI is ready to function. It doesn't help that the voice actor is superb, and the writer did The Company of Myself.
  • Made all the more poignant by several things she mentions throughout the game. At one point, she mentions her creator being depressed and taking pills to fix the problem (antidepressants). It seems innocuous, until she later relates that one day he took all the pills he had at once, said he was going away, and left. She tells you that she hopes she's happy wherever he is now. Later, as you fix her up, she starts to realize that she'd done something horrible, and she let the virus in deliberately to forget what she'd done. Feelings of guilt and sadness weigh her down so much, she begs you to shut down her Emotion Core, because she just can't bear the pain of feeling any more.
• Panzer Dragoon Saga spends most of its third disc in and around the town of Zoah. The Evil Empire would like very much to blow it up, so you spend a lot of time foiling said plans, culminating in an epic attack on a military base and chasing after a missile after it's been fired and taking it apart before it hits the town. Barely ten minutes after this, the Empire cheerfully flies its gigantic dreadnought battleship over to Zoah and uses the ship's stupid-huge laser to blow the town to bits. Admittedly you do find out later on that most of the key NPCs from the town escaped, but still...
• A different kind of punch is delivered in Metal Slug. After finishing the game, the credits cutscene shows you what you have been doing so far in the game. Dead bodies everywhere. The final blow is a mourning widow/daughter at a grave of a rebel soldier.
  • A happier version of this ending with most of the soldiers still alive is shown if the game is beaten with 2 players, making it sort of a twisted version of The Power of Friendship.
• Sin and Punishment 2's 6th Stage. After defeating a Keeper, you come across its offspring. At first Isa and Kachi decide to spare it, which turns out to be a very bad idea: the hatchling takes control of a crane and holds whoever you're not playing as, and now you have to rescue him/her. Oh, and did I mention that said hatchling holds your partner over a rising sea of lava, which you must outrun by raising the platform that he and the crane is on as well as shooting the hatchling to force him to raise your partner higher? Not only that, if your partner gets too close to the lava, the hatcling will dump him/her into the lava and you get to watch as he/she falls in screaming and DIES.

Simulation Games

• In Ace Combat 5, during one of the last missions of the Wardog Squadron, you and your fighter wing are flying security over a peace rally in your capital city when an enemy vanguard of fightercraft leads several wings of bombers into the area. You mop them up as the civilians evacuate the stadium, but your wingman Chopper's aircraft is critically damaged. To prevent the injury of innocents, he stays in the stricken fighter until the stadium is cleared, aiming to eject after setting a crash course for the now-empty field. Only.... his electrical systems fail, and he goes down in flames, unable to eject. Cue a final wing of enemy aircraft flying into the area, their radio chatter proclaiming that the Wardog squadron isn't invincible after all. It's a powerful, dramatic moment of Unstoppable Rage for the characters (and probably the player, too).

Enemy Pilot: What the?! They're flying even better than before?!

• • Made even more dramatic by the fact that there is no dramatic music immediately after this, and no radio chatter from your own squadron. Their missiles say more than words ever could...
  • And it's especially powerful because of just how damn noble Chopper is in the moments leading up to his death. He has the chance to ditch his fighter and let it crash, but that would mean letting it fall onto one of the thousands of houses below. The other wingmen suggest dropping it into the stadium, but he wants to wait for more people to evacuate. By the time he's able to safely dispose of his craft, he finds out that it wouldn't make a difference either way, because he can't eject. Rather than whine about it, he accepts his fate, aims his aircraft directly at the center of the field, and crashes. The whole time, everybody is pleading with him not to do it. Even Thunderhead, the AWACS Commander who has insisted on referring to him as "Captain Davenport" in every mission leading up to this, starts calling him "Chopper." In fact, he screams it. This prompts Chopper's last words:

Chopper: Heh. I'm gonna miss that voice....

• In Wing Commander, if one of the other pilots died on a mission you would be treated to a short funeral cutscene where your player delivered a eulogy and their coffin was sent into space. What made it worse was that none of their deaths were scripted to occur, so the player knows that they could have prevented it.
  • Also, in Wing Commander 3, an old wingman commits possibly the most shocking Face Heel Turn in video game history.
  • Wing Commander 4 had Vagabond die out of nowhere in a cutscene. Though it was Fore Shadowed if you are familiar with Wing Commander's history of forecasting characters' deaths via poker games.
• In all Harvest Moon games taking place in Forget-Me-Not Valley Nina dies once your child is born and they go to the 3 year timeskip.
• In Free Space, your capital ship and captain for the first half of the game are blown to bits while all you can do is watch from your fighter. For the last half of the game, the menu screen is different (reflecting being on a new ship) as are the briefing voiceovers (reflecting your new, not-dead captain).

Stealth-Based Games

• In the Final Battle of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater Snake has to fight his best friend and mentor in a duel to the death. She gives a long final speech about her motives and why she is willing to sacrifice everything to fulfill her duty, and tells Snake that he has to fulfill his own. Like in most fights of the series, she's not immediately dead after being defeated and with her last words demands that Snake shoot her with her own gun. But you don't get to simply watch Snake shoot her. You have to press the fire button yourself. Which directly leads to the birth of Big Boss.
  • A cutscene in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops has the villain indirectly kill off the first soldier you collected in the game, who gets a little bit of screen-time, but has almost all of his emotional connection to the player being the fact that he'd been there since the beginning.
  • The original MGS has the death of the horribly mentally and physically twisted Grey Fox, crushed under the foot of Metal Gear REX. As an added bonus, you then get to repeatedly fire missiles into the face of the bastard that killed him.
    • Go ahead, call Revoler Ocelot's bluff about him killing Meryl if you give into the torture.
  • How often do you keep a dying villain company for his last minutes, and especially villains who repeatedly shot at your friend with a sniper rifle to lure you out of your hiding place? For Sniper Wolf you do, and it's unbelievably sad.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has multiple Player Punches. So many, in fact, that it's possible the game will seriously injure your psyche if you're not careful. Almost everyone comes out okay in the end, but man.
  • Even more incredibly hard hitting is the "The Reason You Suck" Speech given to Raiden, by GW near the end of the game. Even though it doesn't actually involve anyone dying, it makes a huge emotional impact by practically chewing out the player more so than the character.
  • Another Player Punch from MGS3 was the torture sequence. By the time it was over, I wanted to kill Volgin like no other video game character I have yet seen.
    • A slight one, also from Snake Eater, is if you let The End die of old age in your duel. All he wanted is a Final Battle against a Worthy Opponent and you couldn't or wouldn't give it to him. Even Snake was saddened by that.
• More or less completely inverted in Manhunt. The villain in the game is a disturbing sadist who compels the player character to acts of excessive, wanton violence for his own entertainment and watches the proceedings through a series of disembodied cameras. Not many games end with the player killing the personification of the part of themself that enjoys the game.
  • A non meta example involves Cash saving different members of his family from a group of crazed hunters, only to be told at the end of the level that their deaths would be necessary, and are killed shortly after.
• In Assassin's Creed II, the first hour of the game introduces Ezio's family, and aside from the initial fight with the Pazzi, all the missions show you that the Auditore household is solid and full of love. You hang out with affable big brother Fredrico, beat up sister Claudia's cheating boyfriend, collect feathers for sickly little brother Pettruccio, and do jobs for his Reasonable Authority Figure parents Giovanni and Maria. They look like they're going to be part of the story for a while, especially considering the detailed profiles regarding them in the database. Then his father and brothers - yes, including the twelve-year-old Pettruccio - are hanged at Rodrigo Borgia's order, and his mother goes mute from shock when the guards who came for them tried to rape her. Oh, it is on now. Those Templar fuckers are going down.
  • Made even worse when Ezio finally confronts Rodrigo, who says he only had Ezio's brothers hung to show the Templar do not offer mercy to their enemies.
  • Brotherhood has Rodrigo Borgia's son Cesare kill Ezio's uncle Mario to conclude the siege of Monteriggioni. Oh, it's really fucking on now. We're not gonna spare you this time, Borgia, you had your chance, and you blew it.
    • The siege of Monteriggioni also laid waste to your hard work synchronizing (outside of the story) with Ezio in the second game. All the renovations, all the money spent, all the collectibles... gone in a single morning. For the split-second that it's visible, apparently not even the Armor of Altair survived (intact).
    • Juno forcing Desmond to stab Lucy while Desmond can do nothing but struggle and watch is possibly the worst, the fact that it comes without warning doesn't help at all.
      • Even worse? The player is forced to do it, as well. The cutscene cannot continue until you move the control stick. One. Step. At. A. Time. And then, you must deliver the attack with the familiar "press any button" input.
    • Caterina's admittance that their only night together was all politics for her definitely feels like this. The novelization actually has Ezio angsting about this for quite a bit, even contemplating abandoning it all and running away with Caterina, only for her to reiterate that she doesn't love him. Then, just to hammer it home, Desmond in the present asks what happened to her, and it's revealed that she never got her city back, then got sick and died. While this is pretty much Caterina's fate in Real Life, it still sucks.
• Assassin's Creed introduces you to each of the targets by showing them commit an atrocity. The first brutally stabs a man to death for talking back to him, the second has a man's legs broken because he tried to flee the hospital of horrors, one throws a scholar onto a pile of burning books because the man argued (peaceably and politely) that books are treasures to be preserved, not destroyed, and another murders an innocent priest because he thinks the man might be you...the list goes on. The player is always completely unable to intervene and has to watch these terrible things happen, even though some of them would be so easy to prevent because you're literally a few yards away from the target.
  • Then the game punches you a second time by having a long conversation with each target in which he justifies his actions, or makes the player pity him, or etc. In short, the game takes away the first punch and in doing so makes the second death another punch.
    • All of them except for Majd Addin, who turns out to be a psychopath who killed people for fun.

Survival Horror

• In the bad ending of Fatal Frame II, the main character chases her possessed sister into the caves under the village, but will find herself forced to undergo the barbaric ritual of the village that you've been (indirectly) suffering the consequences of all game: Mio chokes Mayu to death, turning her spirit into one of the Crimson Butterflies that have been fluttering around the village. And the worst part? THIS WILL ALWAYS HAPPEN TO YOU YOUR FIRST TIME THROUGH THE GAME. The good end isn't even available unless you're playing on a higher, unlocked difficulty.
  • The real Player Punch? This is the canonic ending. And the very fact that the deliberately brutal and emotionally cruel sacrifices are supposed to be the right thing to do in the games' setting was a pretty big Player Punch.
  • Even better? That's not even the worst ending. In that ending, you just run and leave Mayu behind getting a creepTASTIC promise from Mayu and Sae that they will always be waiting for their sisters... Though, if you didn't like Mayu...
• Even if you have already been spoiled on the truth about James in Silent Hill 2 or picked up on the disturbing implications of the anvilicious foreshadowing, the inevitable reveal is still a kick in the gut. (L0rdVega's Blind Playthrough is the perfect example of this. Listen to his muted "I knew it" at 3:12 and compare to how mercilessly he'd otherwise been mocking James' incompetence in other videos.)
  • Silent Hill 2 actually plays with this trope in several ways. In addition to what was described above, the game twists the knot on this trope with Maria, whose presence results in at least three Player Punches—and, in most cases a fourth, which you yourself must deliver. Alternatively, in the case of a particular ending, instead of Maria dying a fourth time, the player encounters his own wife, who is (sort of) alive and (completely) furious with you, and after you've spent the entire game ostensibly trying to find her, only to discover that you killed her yourself, you have to kill her again.
    • And that's after you've had to kill Eddie. Though granted he wasn't very simpathetic, but Angela was and you had to just watch as she walked away into hell. Having some actual people around just to make terrible things happen pretty much highlights what a twisted place Silent Hill is.
    • Then, of course, we have the "In Water" ending, where James commits suicide, and the full text of the letter from his wife (which was a posthumous note) was read by the VA... and we find out that she wanted him to live his life.
  • In Silent Hill 3, Harry is killed specifically to piss off Heather (and by extension the player). Vincent's death is also a pretty powerful Player Punch, the charming bastard.
    • Agentjr discovering Harry's body in his playthrough is pretty much how most Silent Hill fans felt. The aftermath to the player punch is also very bitter.
      • The original Silent Hill also has Harry pushing away and running from a desperate and horrified Lisa Garland.
  • The Good ending of Silent Hill delivers a huge Player Punch by making you kill Cybil, only to later find out that the innocuous red liquid you picked up in the hospital and forgot about four hours ago could have saved her.
  • The Wicked and the Weak ending to Silent Hill Shattered Memories.
• In Dead Space, you find multiple logs from Temple and Cross, two people who survived a while and are built up as quite sympathetic as you hear from them... but they're probably already dead. You find out they're not, just in time for the evil Mad Scientist to brutally kill them while a security lockdown keeps you from doing anything but watching.
  • Even worse; NICOLE IS DEAD. Sure, it was foreshadowed heavily, but finding out that Isaac's entire reason for being there, the one reason he kept going, had killed herself before he even arrived and the rest was all just a Mind Screw kinda hurt.
  • Hell, even Hammond's death. It's easy to go back on forth on him throughout the game—is he a good guy, is he a backstabbing bastard like Kendra is saying? But that tends to fade after he puts his all into helping you get the ship back together and encourages you to keep going, and even nearly dies from toxin inhalation. Then you finally meet up with him again, only to watch him be viciously torn apart by a Brute.
• The original Resident Evil and the REmake has this with Richard. The original had him dying even if you got the serum for him in time, and in Remake, he lives long enough to get eaten by something. Chris's scenario is the worst of the two, as you can actually watch over Richard while he sleeps.
• In the case of Eternal Darkness, maybe this could be called something along the lines of Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu And Cthulhu Punched Back, as eleven twelfths of the game take place within the chapters of a book of the fight against an Eldritch Abomination God on the rise spanning history, each chapter focusing on a different character's efforts. Every one of these characters was a perfectly ordinary (essentially) and usually quite lovable person who just had to get mixed up in the whole thing, often by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even though they usually strike a blow, it's at a dear cost. Say, life or sanity. Some of the hardest punches are when Ellia, a dancer seeking entertainment in a temple to Kali, finds out that the temple houses yet another Eldritch Abomination God and is made to hold its essence - which keeps her from dying even when she's killed for knowing too much, the last bit not something you know until another character over a thousand years later finds her remains and she passes it on to him and Anthony, a messenger for Charlemagne, gets blasted with a curse meant for Charlemagne that slowly turns him into a zombie and, long story short, by the time he gets to Charlemagne to tell him of impending treachery he finds out he's too late and is left zombified, unable to die, and alone for centuries until the player, as yet another character, is forced to put him out of his misery themself. And he still whispers "Charlemaaagne!" and lets out this pathetic moan now and then, too. That Anthony played by wonderfully talented Cam Clark helps.
  • The Lovecraftian themes of Eternal Darkness lend themselves well to the player punch as only four of the playable characters come out merely scarred for life with most of their mental faculties intact. For another example there's Paul, the very sympathetic priest, who has to fight Anthony later as an enraged zombie. He prays for Anthony's soul afterwards which, although arguably futile given the Lovecraftian universe the game exists in, helps bring some closure to poor Anthony. Then what happens? You get to the end of the chapter and meet a giant . . . thing that either eats Paul's head or makes it pop like a balloon and there's not a damn thing you can do about it because it's a cutscene. Peter Jacobs gets to take that blasted head-eater down later, thankfully.
• Penumbra: Overture has the player crawling through a dark, crumbling mining complex filled to the (cracked) rafters with Eldritch Abominations and once-living creatures, all the while being lead by a seemingly kindred spirit known as "Red" who is clearly insane from isolation. However, he befriends the player in a one-sided way, and you'll likely get attached to him as well. However, in the final moments of the game, to open the door and move on, the player must incinerate poor Red, who is laying in an oven, to get the key to move on, as Red had been suffering alone for so long, and had convinced himself, in his madness that he could not take his own life, as "That was against the rules". The second you get your guts up to start the machine he screams bloody murder. Cue My God, What Have I Done?, Heroic BSOD on the PLAYER end, and ending it all with a Tear Jerker from being Player Punched so hard.
  • It gets worse in the sequel, Black Plague. There, you befriend Amabel, a scientist that needs your help to escape and find a cure for a virus that's going around... which, incidentally, infects you and results in Clarence's snarky comments echoing in your head for the rest of the game. But the topper is when you finally reach Amabel, and are greeted with an Infected instead, which you then have to kill by dropping a crate atop it... only for Clarence to say "Gotcha" and reveal that it was Amabel the whole time.]] The exact phrasing used in that scene can be found under Nice Job Breaking It, Hero in Penumbra's page.
    • Not to mention that any Genre Savvy player that kept their wits about them knew it was her, only makes the Player Punch that much harder.