This VN has so much wrong with it that it isn't even funny. The presentation is horribly inconsistent and not even good (except for the (real) anime, the real anime looks pretty good), the porting job to PC is bad (had to plug in a controller to figure out how to leave an area and pause, among other things, and steam achievements literally do not work), The music sucks pretty bad, a lot of the plot twists are absolutely nothingburgers that have no consequence (including the big one), I was never given a reason to care about the characters, the sound design is bad (some songs are way too loud and drown out the character voices and some of the SFX are also way too loud), the gameplay is mostly meaningless and either brainless or guesswork (Shitty ghost trick), and the plot is also nonsensical and bad. Worst of all, it isn't even funny. It could have actually made me laugh a good amount and I would have forgiven some of it, but it is just not. Never play this.

VN absurdity.
On the surface- A floating talking cat guides you on a journey of a lifetime…Where you try to find a way to regain your body as you roam the house you live in, as a spirit - But take heed, any inadvertent sighting of panties from your roommates and the world shall be destroyed! Literally. The End Complete. So tread carefully my friend. And there’s a countdown to Doomsday with an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, cheered on by a terrorist organization wanting to annihilate humanity. What’s the connection? 7 billion people are at risk and you’re humanity’s only hope to try and figure it out to save us all.

That’s the game and if you can’t see how enjoyable that could be, we can’t be friends.

But wait! There’s more!

Just when you think the game is about to conclude, you realize that you’re only halfway there, and a whole time loop, body swapping story emerges. And after all the ludicrous insanity early on, it is slowly revealed that there’s an actual method behind this madness. There’s more than meets the eye here. Stupid and ridiculously funny at times but some dark undertones and some thought provoking philosophical ideas on existentialism are at its core concept.

As for “playing “, the first half consists of scaring your roommates so you can feed off their fear and be able to perform Trick Chains of cause and effect to achieve a specific goal to move the story forward. The second half is a fairly straightforward VN, with a series of narrative options to choose from. Although it appears there’s only one true path to victory, as a few choices I made destroyed the earth and ended the game. Reload and choose the other path to continue.

The game is presented in episodic format like the anime it’s based on and actually has full sequences of the anime imbedded within.

I had fun with it, but It’s definitely not for everyone. Proceed with caution. Now will somebody get that theme song out of my head!

This one was a big disappointment for me. Honestly, the premise is quite silly, so my expectations weren't that high to begin with, but the story in itself is surprisingly complex and well written, so no complaints from me there. However, most of the characters are extremely childish and dimwitted, and not in a cute way, as the creators probably intended them to be... If you ask me, they were annoying as hell. As for the gameplay, I have to admit, I had a bit of fun during the trick chain puzzles in the first half, but even those disappear in the second half, where you don't have to do anything just watch and make a few choices here and there. The anime cutscenes were nice, I guess, so if you're interested in the plot, my advice is to watch the anime instead.

Punchline is a bland, boring, and forgettable visual novel/point-and-click hybrid that aims to emulate its anime counterpart, but fails in every possible way.

Controls

Ok, so the controls themselves weren't too bad, X to skip movies, R1 to fast forward, and Square to auto-play text. The issue that I had here is that they never tell you this once you begin the game. The only way to find this information is by checking the config menu. This could just be a case of me being a bit stupid and not checking there first, but it seems like something they should be telling the player in the first place.

Gameplay

The idea for the game was pretty good, create a visual novel for the story aspects and mix it with a point-and-click game when it comes to the moment to moment gameplay. Unfortunately, in execution the ball is dropped completely. The visual novel sections pale in comparison to the anime and the art choice they use fail to convey any sense of emotion or life. The point-and-click sections aren't as bad, but due to story restrictions, just stop halfway through the game. Leading the player to have to deal with the terrible visual novel and nothing else for the second half of the game.

Sound

The music is fine. Its forgettable and annoying at points (i.e. the "joke" songs), but fine. It matches the tone of the game nicely, and never felt repetitive or out of place. The voice acting is also acceptable, but never really excels.

Art

This and the story are what really made me hate this game. Imagine the models from Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma, but with a terrible plot, bad character development, and no emotion behind the voice acting. Also, the animation was done by a 12-year-old. The environments are rather nice and fun to look around, but are never really used effectively. Punchline also strips a ton of footage from the anime, and I mean A TON. Every single chapter you have to watch an opening and closing (the same opening and closing every time to be exact) where most of it is just pulled from the anime. Probably a quarter to a third of the game's cutscenes are just ripped straight from the anime, but for some reason many of the shots are just still shots from the anime. They just stand still and narrate over them. Sometimes they move the mouths, but keep everything else completely static. The choices made in this game confuse me to no end.

Story

Just watch the anime.

Note: Review originally written March 3, 2019

Y'know, if you say you've played a "low-budget anime tie-in game", I'm gonna feel obligated to check your privilege from now on, because what you played is probably above Punch Line, one of the lower-tier games I've played.

The one point I'd really be able to give to this game is the story, but I can so transparently tell that the plot is borrowed directly from the anime it's based on. The game outright borrows clips from all throughout the anime (at least, I assume), down to having unskippable opening/ending credits rolls for each "episode". What's even more unappealing is how the game cuts between in-engine cutscenes and anime scenes. It's extremely jarring, both in terms of transitions, and how the in-engine VN-esque scenes severely lack the energy and sense of humor that the anime scenes seem to have down pat. I'm probably going to end up watching the anime instead, because I'm interested in seeing what perverted pseudo-science jargon that Kotaro Uchikoshi has cooked up this time, and I can already tell that this game doesn't do it justice.

I don't think I escaped the tutorial, but the gameplay feels really uninteresting. It seems like a cool concept for a puzzle game (even though its core concepts have already been done in an exceptionally better game, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective), but the execution is extremely lacking. It feels like the developers cheaped out on animations wherever they could, even for the character models in VN segments. Everything feels disjointed and nothing ever feels satisfying. Don't even get me started on the mechanic of making sure not to look at panties for too long. But on that note...

Panties are kinda front-and-center in this game (in case the boxart didn't tip you off), and I gotta be brutally honest here. As a self-proclaimed anime panty connoisseur, who plays various Japanese games with varying degrees of panty exposure, the panties in this game are pretty fucking weak. In turn, the fact that the game is urging me to not look at the panties backfires completely. I could easily go get my fix from various other games that are tongue-in-cheek about their fanservice in much more clever or unashamed ways, such as Bullet Girls Phantasia, Gun Gun Pixies, Gal*Gun, Natsuiro High School, Akiba's Trip 2, or Senran Kagura (this one's actually a good game series, check it out).

To summarize, this game bored me to tears, and only inspired me to watch the anime that the game is based off of instead. If I wanna play a game that'll humorously titillate me, I've got various other options on hand. This game's fucking worthless in my eyes, and that's my own unfunny "punch line", I suppose.