Punch Line

i don't really care about a pc port or pervy game core i like it really good story and songs with boring gameplay
maybe 10/10

i saw the panties and now the world will burn

TL;DR : I came for copper, but found gold.
Very recommended for Visual Novel lover.
Story at first seems like a dumb love comedy, but escalates quickly into something very serious.

You should play this fully knowing that this is basically a VISUAL NOVEL.
The minimum gameplay it has is basically just mini game.
The game is kinda goofy, but if u can get past all that, its pure golden.

About the complaints in the other reviews, I can address some :
1. Controller not detected : you can enable all controllers in the steam settings for the game.
2. Cannot skip anime cutscenes : from my controller, pressing A for about 3 seconds skips all anime cutscenes. Your controller might differ but there is a button that can do it.
3. First half of game only consists of Slice of Life story : Well, if you are VN lover, naturally you should like SoL scenes, Most VNs have them, its no exception here. I happen to enjoy all the parts of the story.
4. The game's "puzzles" can only be solved with trial and error : Can't argue with this. In fact, in all Uchikoshi games I have played, this is true. You should get a walkthrough, especially after a character in the game said "I have seen you do this 6 billion times". Do yourself a favor and save time.

This is probably VN with highest budget I have ever played.
All the VAs did very good job here. ( Have been big fan of Amamiya Sora, Tomatsu Haruka, and Kugimiya Rie for a long time )
Uchikoshi is really good at mystery stories.

As a game, it's not worth $50. I would probably only start considering it at half the price, and I did get it at a steep discount.

But for as dumb as it is and panties aside (no pun intended), I love it anyway. I will proudly publish this multiple paragraph-long review of an eroge with one of the dumbest premises I've ever heard. I already watched the anime I think twice at this point, but coming back to it in visual novel form, it still affects me, if not even moreso due to the interactive medium. I'm writing this review at four in the morning right after unironically shedding some tears of both joy and sadness. I find a lot of the character interactions cute or touching, and you can feel them bonding as they struggle to navigate the ordeals in their way, or as they sing off beat and off key karaoke, cheering each other on the whole time. They learn to trust each other and, to some degree, change as people. It makes me feel grateful for my friends.

The panties aspect is more of a marketing and comedic element rather than erotic. It gets your foot in the door for something dumb, but what drives the story is the character interactions. A lot of what happens is listening to people talk to each other, then guiding them to have more interactions. Eventually the dynamic changes considerably, but remains heavy on interpersonal stuff. This is a slice-ot-life at heart, even with the rather involved plot.

The actual gameplay segments are ironically the worst part about the game. They're point and click puzzles which task you with either scaring someone or getting people to do things to further your goals. Frankly the visual novel choices the game gives you are more interesting, even when there's only a right and wrong answer. The most egregious part of it is the timed sections, which are just frustrating and counter to the design of the minigames.

The music is serviceable, with some good tracks.

Also I still don't know what the punchline is, maybe I'll figure it out one of these days. Maybe it's just that I played the game and watched the anime.

Not compatible with steam deck. I know it’s old but pleaseeeeee fix it :)

This is definitely the worst Visual Novel I've read in my life (so far, at least). I really think that Punch Line is an utter piece of garbage that one should only read to see the train wreck.
Things I hate about it:
The visuals and presentation look like trash and are extremely inconsistent. The 3D models of both the characters and the environment look bad, there are "fake" cutscenes that are just screenshots of the anime but they have the characters moving every few lines, and there's the anime. The actual anime scenes are the only good things about the presentation; everything looks cheap and illmade. I've seen VNs with shoestring budgets that look so much better than this does. (If you want to see an actual good looking (and good quality) 3D VN, look at Robotics;Notes, and that game came out multiple years before this did.)
The music is Bad. I can't name a single song I liked in this game, and some songs that played are genuinely horrible or terribly boring. The worst one has to be the one that plays when they're doing the happymancy nonsense. That song makes me want to do horrible things.
Why did they need to have to show the OP and ED that many times? It's a huge waste of time and gets extremely irritating by the end. (unless you know how to skip it; i will get to this later, it is tied up in another complaint). It doesn't do anything for the immersion, it's just bad design.
The sound design is lackluster. The sound balancing between the music and the voice acting is bad for quite a few songs. This is a relatively minor complaint since it can be fixed in the settings but I personally think that an attempt should be made to make the default settings normal.
The port job is fucking terrible in regards to the controls. In the sections where you have to leave a room and go back to the room select, I literally couldn't find a button combination that allowed me to do that on mouse and keyboard. I HAD to plug in a controller to do this. Controller also is probably the only way to skip the OPs and EDs and they don't TELL YOU ABOUT THIS ANYWHERE. (Hold the face buttons down for a while, I believe this works consistently). I really shouldn't have to plug in a controller to a game that says that it works on Mouse/Keyboard. THE ACHIEVEMENTS ARE BROKEN TOO! HOW DO YOU FUCK THAT UP???
The gameplay is boring and completely uninteresting. It's just shitty ghost trick.; It's completely brainless (just picking whatever's there) for the most of the game, but near the end it just becomes blind guesswork. I guess that's what they think difficulty is like: being forced to read the minds of the developers or you lose.
All of the characters are either annoying or uninteresting, and none of them get any good arcs. I was given no good reasons to care about them whatsoever. And this leads to the fact that...
The plot is nonsense and the twists are completely impact-less and barely affect the plot at all. The worst one is probably the gender twist. It literally does not matter whatsoever and is a complete nothingburger. It didn't need to exist, so why? I could go into depth on some of these but I won't. It's just not worth it. I don't want a game this bad to take up more space than it needs to in my brain.
The panties stuff is just bland and obnoxious too. If they were going to do something like that, why not go all the way? The way it is, it pleases neither normal people, nor degenerates; it works for nobody.
I think Punch Line's worst sin is that it isn't even funny. I could find it in my heart to forgive it a bit if it made me laugh a few times, but I didn't laugh a single time playing this game. It tries so hard to be funny and miserably fails.
There's ONE thing I like about this, and it's the fact that the ACTUAL anime cutscenes look good. I watched the anime myself after this (to punish myself) and, while it's still bad, is a superior way to experience the story and it made me laugh at least twice. This is why I won't personally give it a 1/10.
If you for some reason want to buy this game, for the love of god do not buy it at full price (I bought it for like 10). There are so many other Visual Novels that are so much better than this mess even just on Steam that cost around the same or significantly less. Umineko, The House in Fata Morgana (+A Requiem for Innocence), Chaos;Head Noah + Chaos;Child, 2236 AD, Seabed, Root Double, Little Busters, Clannad, Robotics;Notes (skip DaSH), SubaHibi (not for everyone), BALDR SKY, Steins;Gate (original), ATRi -My Dear Moments-, Planetarian, Muv Luv Alternative, 428: Shibuya Scramble, all of the Ace Attorney collections (including the upcoming one), Higurashi is also good but it's more pricey, the list goes on and on and on. Please read literally anything else.

people are right about it getting good halfway through, but theres too much you have to put up with before that to make it really worth it. the puzzles are trial-and-error, the characters start off too generically, and the pacing is like if one piece was slice-of-life. there's a bunch of details that make things just that much worse too, like how you cant skip the anime opening and ending between episodes, the controls are labelled wrong for the controller, and the achievements are broken. again, if youre patient there's a lot to like after the story takes off, but i'd say its only for uchikoshi superfans (even then you can just watch the anime). and dont buy it at full price i got it for like 5 bucks

Intrigued by the story but as a visual novel it did not do it justice. The visual novel structure was not what I was expecting. The first half was simple detective mode like game play by clicking on the right stuff on the right order. The first few times it take a bit to understand the mechanics then it becomes easy for the most part unless you don't notice one that you really needed. The second half becomes a visual novel but you quickly figure out that there are only two routes. You quickly find out that there isn't much decisions and the correct answers are easy to guess once you figure that out. The biggest problem for me was that the visual novel ending up being mostly a video.

At the end of the day I can't really recommend this because it did not really feel like a visual novel and it did not have any real routes to choose from. Also note that achievement hunters out there the achievements are not working at all. Honestly surprised that the developers didn't try to fix it. Ended up finishing the game to completion since I haven't seen the anime but still came out disappointed in the game more than the anime story itself.

Long story short buy it on a sale if you are interested but don't try to expect too much out of it.

Pretty fun games! Relive the anime is amazing fun ! I hope more of this fun games in future. Those mixed in thought don't know to see it awesome yet! Great pick up game for sure!

"If you see underwear, the world will end". Hey, you already had me at underwear, you don't need to sweeten the deal with an apocalypse!

An epic man's quest to save the Earth by avoiding panties; ends up dying BILLIONS of times in an attempt to unknowingly recover his balls while becoming immortal; and is most likely going to have sex with himself.

Nope. I'm serious.

Can't believe I almost gave up on this game! Okay; slow start, do be warned. The story takes a bit of time to pick up, but after a while I couldn't leave it alone; I had grown endeared to the character and the story and mysteries of the series piqued my interest. To be fair, I'm a sucker for WELL-DONE time travel shenanigans - and panties - so my opinion is certainly biased.

Gotta say; this doesn't happen often; I'm usually pretty good at sniffing reveals and twists but this one got me completely by surprise in at least two separate occasions. The last scenes were beautifully animated; basically a whole anime episode included just for closure. Definitely recommended.

This game is overall good, but hard to recommend. I wanna start off by saying this is a visual novel at heart and if you're looking into buying this for the puzzles then don't. The major cons of this game are that the first half is very slow and the puzzles are just mindless trial and error. It's also worth mentioning that this game has a lot of fanservice, and while not necessarily a bad thing depending on your tastes it can take you out of it. The pros of this game are that it has a very strong and complex story reminiscent of Uchikoshi's other works, as well as decent characters.

tldr: Good story if you can get past the slow start, stupid puzzles, and aren't bothered by fanservice

don't buy this if you expect much like "many" interactions in game

you can only buy this when you expect visual novel style of games...

Overall, I can't recommend this game in its current state.

The characters are interesting, and the story itself is decent enough, but in this case it's better to go watch the anime instead (which in a rare event for anime and game adaptations, the anime actually has more story than the game does).

While the anime does have a "go play the game" ending, and the game does have the happy ending that the anime is missing -- and it is a nice ending -- I don't think it can really justify doing pretty much the whole anime over again in game form.

There is a bit of fairly simplistic puzzle-room-esque gameplay in the first half, while the second half (and anime watchers already know what the tipping point is) has none of that and just goes back to a mix of dialogue choices (and by that I mean "pick the single correct answer or it's game over), animations, and VN scenes. But one of the most compelling elements to perhaps choose game over anime -- the achievements -- while supposedly present, don't actually work at all. You just can't get any of them, which is presumably a simple bug that the developer has never bothered to patch.

The game also has more of a focus on the panty shots (which I felt were the weakest part of the story and entirely gratuitous, even though there's an attempt to justify it in-world) -- including a gallery of ones you've seen, despite them causing a game over for whatever sequence you're in. Add to this that the game comes with a full anime OP and ED sequence repeated for each "episode" (which is skippable, but in a very unobvious way that is not revealed through the tutorial, only in the included manual), and some of the puzzle sequences are timed -- well, it's all just a recipe for frustration rather than fun.

The game does include some scenes from the anime as well -- most especially in the second half. But some of the final scenes play out just a little bit differently, and there's an extra OVA unlocked in the main menu once you've finished.

Overall, if you loved the anime and just can't live without seeing the happy ending, then it may be worth the trouble, but only at a deep deep discount. Otherwise just don't bother. If the developers ever fix the achievements, then that might bump it up a little bit higher.

Sensual Haunting: The Anime? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Unfortunately, not quite.

This is an extremely dull, conceptually deceiving visual novel mixed with some bland, linear, cumbersome "gameplay", if you could even call it that. Don't be fooled by the false marketing and user-defined tags; there is absolutely zero nudity in this game, and there is no sexual content of any kind, not even innuendo. If seeing a panty shot counts as "sexual content" to you, you really need to go out and interact with real girls, or at least introduce yourself to the internet and adult videos.

Firstly, the controls in this game are absolutely horrible. Contrary to what is advertised on the store page, controllers do not work with this game. The game is played completely with keyboard (no mouse support either). The buttons cannot be remapped and they are extremely bizarre:-

D: A (confirm)
X : B (cancel)
A : X
W: Y
Q: L1
E: R1
Enter: Menu
Esc: Exit game (pressing Esc causes the game to glitch into windowed mode and can't be restored to fullscreen unless you completely exit and relauch the game so make sure you don't accidentally press it)

You play as Yuta, a ghost who has been ejected from his body after a bus hijacking incident, and follows his adventures as he tries to return to his body, while trying to prevent the world from being destroyed by a meteor. If Yuta sees a girl's panties and gets too aroused, the meteor will crash into the Earth and cause global extinction.

Most of the game involves long visual novel sections interspersed with clips taken directly from the anime. There is a huge amount of filler and as a result, the story drags out way too slowly and quickly becomes boring. The characters are bland, forgettable and plain-looking. There are a lot of repeated anime cutscenes to the point where it gets on your nerves. The story is divided into 21 episodes and the exact same anime opening plays at the start of every episode; that's the exact same cutscene repeated 21 times over the course of the game. By the time I reached episode 6 I was bored to tears and basically fastforwarding through the dialogue and skipping the cutscenes just to get to the end of the game as the panty gallery is only unlocked once you finish the game.

In the first 13 episodes of the game, there are short gameplay sections where the aim is either to scare one of Yuta's four female housemates by playing ghost tricks on her around the house, or accomplish a task by chaining a series of tricks. The tricks you need to select often have consequences that make no sense, so you end up resorting to trial and error if you pick the wrong tricks. You also have to watch out for the girls' panties. When you come into view of a girl's panties ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) either by switching camera angles or as a result of playing a trick, the Boom gauge will start to fill up and you have to switch to another camera angle or move the camera away quickly to stop staring at her panties. If the Boom gauge fills completely, it's game over; the world ends and you have to restart the entire gameplay section from the beginning. Unfortunately, you have to get a game over for looking at the girls' panties in every episode to unlock entries in the panty gallery, so this means you'll be watching the world ending and time reversal cutscenes a ludicrous amount of times if you wanna fully fill out the panty gallery. For a game that is supposedly built around around the lewd concept of looking up girls' skirts at their panties, the game actively punishes you for doing so but at the same time that's the only thing actually worth playing this game for. As a wise blond-haired president once said, "sounds good, doesn't work".

Apparently the game can offer up to 20 hours of visual novel voice-acted dialogue, but I seriously question the sanity of anyone who can sit through the incredibly boring plot. I started fastforwarding through the dialogue at episode 6 and finished the game in 6 hours just to see the fruits of my efforts in the panty gallery. Unfortunately, while the panty gallery does offer better shots of the girls' panties, most of the girls' panties in this game are really common-looking and not arousing at all. There is a distinct lack of all the features that make panties exciting; no ribbons, frills or sexy materials such as see-through lace or silk. The low-res graphics don't help at all, to make matters worse. In fact, the artwork in the anime custcenes are extremely lacklustre as well.

I honestly cannot recommend this game to anyone looking for an interesting story or good gameplay, or even just for a relaxing time. I bought this game at 80% off during the Steam 2019 Autumn Sale and I still feel cheated (my absolute condolences to anyone who got duped by the user-defined tags and bought this game at the ridiculously high full price). There is zero sexual content in this game and I can't possibly imagine even virgins getting excited over the bland, ugly panties in this game. If you're interested in the premise of a ghost playing tricks on girls to create all sorts of sexy situations, I highly recommend checking out Sensual Haunting by Lessons of Passion, a much more enjoyable game with better graphics, more engaging story and actual sex scenes. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Note: Achievements are currently bugged too, in case anyone was thinking of buying this game for easy achievements.

I could list the negative and positive stuff, but It`s basically the anime in a video/game form. There is more to it but I won`t spoil it. Know that you have to buy it very cheap.
If I had to give a reason for buying it, buy it if you are a fan of the punchline series, but don`t get your hopes up.
So in conclusion I would rate this game 35/100, and that might seem low but it might also be a wake up call to the game developers. They had the opportunity and an ok nice anime story, and they blew it.

The port issues and such are all there. I'm not going to talk about those and, in all honesty, this is PROBABLY not the platform for this game.

So if you're here and have the option to play on another platform, I recommend it.

But I didn't have any huge, issues. Yes there's a bunch of little annoyances here and there and the first half if bad enough to where you just want to stop. I doubt anyone who liked this game would hold it against you, honestly.

The second half, however, is where it picks up and gets good all the way to the end.

A lot of ifs here.

IF you have to play it on this platform
and IF you stick through a pretty awful first half

This game actually has something worthwhile. If you're reading this, you're already a certain type of person who is on the fence with this game. Unfortunately the first 2 hours won't sway you. Get this on sale and you'll be pleasantly surprised.

TL:DR - just watch the anime.
I wonder why visual novel isn't in the category. I wouldn't have purchased it if it was.
Though I got it on sale, it still isn't worth it. Horrible game. Here's why from my opinion:

1. Unskippable intro song / ending song every chapter (of which chapters are not long)
2. Terrible camera movement (instead of using mouse to look around, they force you to use key like a dpad)
3. Gnarly tutorials (the cat guide tries to explain game mechanics to you of which you don't need. they keep appearing in the first few hours to a point where 75% of the time is the cat explaining a very simple game)
4. First few chapters of the story is just filled with filler content except for the intro and a few lines.
5. Gameplay is horrible as well.

I'll try to explain the gameplay without spoiling, but few hours into this basically theres only 2 modes of gameplay. This is also probably all the tutorial you need to know and not waste time reading what the cat says should you get the game. Trick Chain and Level Up.

Level Up is where you try to scare people as a ghost and grab their fear as exp. but theres only one or two options of which are very obvious its not even a gameplay. look and press. look and press.

Trick Chain is where the game has potential, but even this is terrible. Basically you need to move around a few objects so that the following events will change depending on what you do. Move a series of objects to set a chain of events that will occur. However - theres so many problems here as well. If you miss one object, they just repeat you to the beginning. Changing / moving each object should you choose so takes time that is more than necessary. If you do a specific thing, the movie for failing the Trick Chain will happen, unskippable and will waste at least one minute of your time, everytime.

It isn't worth being called a game, much less an adventure game. It's a Slightly glorified visual novel without choices and just horrible overall. The only selling point is the anime looking style and 3d models.

Don't let the lewd content fool you, this game has a surprisingly intricate storyline with a fun cast. The game is mostly visual novel mixed with occasional high quality cutscenes. Gameplay elements are minimal and not difficult until the later stages, but they are fun to play.

There's also a lot of panties in case you were worried. Just try not to blow up the world looking at them.

Kind of tedious to do. Have seen other reviews saying it's a not a great PC port, to which I agree. I would recommend the anime over the game.

Bad port. Only available in fullscreen or windowed with no options to tune the graphics settings. In fullscreen it seems to be locked to 60fps. Now that would be a good thing if it didn't seem like the animations are tied to frame rate making everything look like it's playing in fast-forward. Couple of other bugs I encountered in my short time with the game. Not worth $50, just go watch the anime and save your money.

It really just wasn't worth the wait for me. The puzzles offered only a couple minor challenges requiring serious effort or forethought and were only really a present for the first half of the game. After that it became a very binary visual novel experience with either 'the right answer' or 'the wrong answer that leads to a bad end'. The final chapter of the game is basically just literally ripped from the anime.

At 50 bucks it most definitely just was not worth it as a video game in my eyes. Save yourself the money AND the trouble and just buy the anime and watch that instead. I generally hate writing reviews but this game was such a disappointment I had to say something. With a story mode that I felt like I was slogging through, puzzles that were at best mediocre, and the fact that these puzzles stop half-way through the game, this game is the first I HONESTLY wish I could get my money back instead of accepting that I simply bought a bad game.

Going to preface this by saying that i played the PS4 version of this game and this review is copy-pasted from my thoughts after I finished that but my opinion remains pretty much unchanged. This version may have fixed small issues with the translation or UI since this is being released almost a year later and i haven't checked but that does not change this VN's problems as a lot of them would be prevalent in any version. Anyway my review:
A lot of the game is cutscenes ripped straight from the anime which are unpausable and unskippable, this includes the OP and ED which play at the beginning and end of each chapter, of which there are 21, and they are unskippable. The translation obviously has its flaws (see: "directer" in the op) which are honestly shocking that it made it into something official like this. The visuals are quite bad and the textbox and menus look absolutely horrible. The gameplay sections are completely predictable and involve literally repeating the exact same thing 12 times until you don't have to anymore, and the content of that is... punchline. Panties and shit.
People would say that the second half (last 10 chapters) is much better than the first and I feel that would be a valid judgement, if not for the fact that each chapter of the last half is so short, lasting around 15-20 minutes, the 'last half' may be its saving factor if not for the fact that it's more like 5 hours when you have to put up with way more of just bad panty minigame before you get to it.
furthermore, i feel almost as though i have been scammed in buying this and even using my time on it as i was under the impression there would be content that was original to the VN, this was not exactly false but i can only think of 2 scenes that are actually new. One of which is controversial (i've seen people talk about it) and the other is literally 3 minutes added onto the epilogue. To be honest this added content was quite nice and answered a couple of questions i had at the end of the anime, though at the same time, it's literally 3 minutes... Besides this, there is no new content.
To emphasise this, the last chapter, chapter 21, is literally just episode 12 of the anime. And i don't mean that it's that presented in vn form, I mean it is literally that episode of the anime playing. Ripped straight from the anime. Just 15 minutes of straight anime, unchanged, and unpausable/unskippable.
And as for the actual content, I liked a couple of characters, hated particular others, but other than that it's standard Uchikoshi. If you've played other VNs from these creators such as the infinity or zero escape series, you won't get much from Punchline
Considering the anime is the exact same content, presented in a quicker way, and gets to the point much faster (and actually has a much higher ratio of the good half to bad half) I seriously cannot reccomend the vn when the anime exists.
The anime is actually very decent, it's well animated and has good pacing and hey with only 12 episodes it's not much of an investment, it can be worth watching
In conclusion, the fact that they have, and continue to charge $50 for this is a joke and is seriously taking the piss. If I could ever get back the money I spent on this I would do it in a heartbeat. To anybody reading this is my best warning: Watch the anime instead. If you have already bought it try your best to refund it. I would only reccomend if you are a die-hard fan of punchline the anime series and even then i would implore you to reconsider.
with this in mind, the punchline anime is around a 6/10. The vn (this version) is a 3/10
What a sad waste of time...