Games I Beat in the Year 2026: Punch Club 2: Fast Forward (Steam)
In the game dev world, every game in your backlog has something to learn. As I chip away at my mountainous stack of games, I like to write about what I like and some lessons to take with me to the games that I make. The second game I beat this year is Punch Club 2: Fast Forward on Steam. This life sim has a lot of punch! It's gonna club you too. Gotta be fast and forward on to the blog.
GAMING
6/21/20264 min read
Games I Beat in the Year 2026: Punch Club 2: Fast Forward (Steam)
Overview:
On my mission to tackle my mountainous backlog of video games, the second game I beat this year was Punch Club 2: Fast Forward making this officially the first PC game I’ve beaten since starting this blog. Woo hoo.
Punch Club 2 is a life sim where you balance going to the gym and making money to eat food; all while trying to find your dad in this weird 80’s apocalyptic future (just like real life). It’s got that “one more day” gameplay loop where you’re constantly optimizing your schedule like:
“Do I train? Do I work? Do I eat? Do I sleep?”
The answer is no. You don’t have enough time to do all of them.
Story:
You play as a guy living in a retro-futuristic world under constant surveillance, working dead-end jobs while trying to become a professional fighter. Along the way, you meet a bunch of weird characters, get wrapped up in conspiracies, and slowly piece together what’s actually going on behind the scenes.
Honestly I wasn’t paying much attention to the story; it’s mostly an excuse to get you to fight people and throw jokes. And it throws so many jokes; references, wordplay, self-deprecating jokes at the developer’s expense… it’s chaotic and mad, and it’s almost as if it was written just for my sense of humor.
What’s impressive is that even though I didn’t play the first game, my enjoyment wasn’t hindered. I could tell there were callbacks, returning characters, and inside jokes, but with so many other jokes and references, it didn’t leave me out.
Gameplay:
At its core, Punch Club 2 is a life management sim with a hint of Monster Rancher (at least the Game Boy Advance version I played when I was a kid).
In the life simulator portion you juggle:
Training fighting stats (strength, agility, and stamina)
Working jobs for money
Eating to not die
Sleeping
Completing quests and progressing the story
The life simulation section was pretty difficult starting off. You’d have to make sacrifices like: “I can’t take the bus; I need to buy a protein bar so I don’t die. Maybe if I work for 4 hours I can make enough to train, but then I need to sleep and I don’t know if I’ll have more money to eat things.” But money solves everything. Once you get loaded you can live more carefree. Meaning you can take the bus, buy food other than protein bars, inject chips into your brain, and most importantly: train for combat.
Combat itself is more about preparation than execution. You train your fighter to increase their stats and abilities, then watch the fights play out. For example, if you’re fighting somebody with low stamina, you might want to choose moves and styles that would drain their stamina so they gas out.
Honestly the battle section isn’t very well tutorial-ized. For example, why do a low kick versus a medium kick? There’s icons with different numbers there, but what do they mean? What does any of this mean? What’s the point of anything we do in this life? Our time on this mortal plane is finite and the longer I live the more terrified I am that I have wasted time. And that is truly the biggest tragedy.
Since I’m terrible at video games, I got beat up mercilessly in the beginning. I ended up grinding my stats to the point I could just spam uppercut and win. All I needed to do was train until I matched the stats of my upcoming fight. If I’m not strong enough, just don’t fight or fight the weaker guy.
The core gameplay loop does get repetitive. Even when the game adds new things (like becoming a police officer or running a gym), it doesn’t change the loop, it just adds more things on top of it. You’re still managing time, just with extra responsibilities stacked onto your already stressful fake life.
Also worth mentioning is that there are some bugs. Nothing completely game-breaking for me, but I did run into moments where sequences didn’t trigger properly or quests just… never completed. Despite these minor snags, what surprised me most about Punch Club is just how much content there is.
There are:
Tons of quests
Different jobs
Skill trees
Side activities
Multiple chapters
A whole bunch of systems layered on top of each other
You can really say that this game has a lot of… punch.
Conclusion and Dev Thoughts:
Despite the rough beginning, I had a great time with Punch Club 2: Fast Forward. It’s very suited to my sense of humor and taste in games. It even has Yakuza references which… if you know you know.
As you may know (but most likely not) I’ve worked on my own comedy life sim Fedorable Life. It’s basically: “Live the life of a neckbeard.” Instead of training in martial arts, you watch anime. Instead of fighting people with fists, you fight strangers with words. On the internet. Tomato tomato, you know?
I used to be worried that Fedorable Life wasn’t going to connect with people; that it was the most niche of a niche product in a world where everything wants your attention and time. It had value in its comedy, but at the end of the day it was just a bunch of clicking. You can’t even jump!
Playing through Punch Club 2 and seeing it succeed at constant player engagement through progression and a ridiculous but consistent tone reinforced to me that these types of games don’t need to be mechanically complex; they just need to be addictive and funny. There was a reason people found those old Newgrounds Flash games so addictive, right?
Even my old web browser game connected with people; I’d get messages from players saying that they loved Fedorable Life’s humor and how they’d spend an embarrassingly long time on it.
Speaking of Fedorable Life, I wanted to officially announce the 10-year anniversary remake to Fedorable Life. Here is the trailer below and it’s going to be released on August 20th on Steam. Stealth marketing push. Wishlist it if you want. I’m not the boss of you.
