Punchline!!

Hours played at review time, across 40 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

There's some good elements in this title. The music and art is pretty good, and there's a ton of heart! And I definitely appreciate that. However, the flaws are too big to make me want to recommend this, even if it's free. I'm gonna critique it to the best of my ability, because I think it deserves getting the honest feedback: First off, the dialogue that makes up the entirety of the story isn't really bad, but it feels so drawn out, and takes too long to get to any point. This is really bad when the dialogue is practically all there is to the title, aside from the pretty pictures. On top of that, the main character has a very strong dialect, and the way he speaks is written out, making it a bit of an effort to read it. He's also a really annoying character, like the writer took the main character from Golden Boy, but turned the annoyance level up to 11, and removed anything likeable. So it got really tedious reading this, really fast. What the dev/writer needs is an editor. Either learning to edit themselves, or getting someone else to edit what they write. Second, there is no game here. There is as much gameplay as flipping through a comic book, ie. zero. You open the game, select a chapter, then just continously click through 100% linear dialogue. No choice or branching narratives, no fail states, nothing. It's something I've seen a few times before, and I don't mind reading what is essentially a digital comic book. But don't call it a game(which the developer does) when there's no gameplay. Not even in the visual novel sense. Again, it's just loading it up and reading, while the location image and character portraits swap around to whatever's fitting for the current dialogue. It's a digital comic book. After going through all nine chapters, you're treated to a long winded rant by the developer. Mostly stuff you'd write in a journal. And I honestly think this "hidden chapter" is longer than any of the other chapters! Meanwhile, pictures of cows are shown. Now, some might consider this harsh critique, and maybe it is. But I'm not gonna sugar coat the problems with the title just because it's free or because this was the dev's first. I think anyone considering this ought to know what they're about to spend their time experiencing, and I also think the developer likely would agree with my points. Especially seeing as it's basically four years later, and I'm sure they have more experience at this point, being able to look back with an objective point of view. There is stuff to like here, absolutely! The music's very nice and fitting, the visual design is nice, the art is pretty decent with an interesting style. Not that there's not room for improvement on these points, but the overall presentation is honestly quite good! And I honestly think I would've enjoyed this digital comic book a lot more, if the dialogue had been given more work and been properly edited. Very early on I got a feeling that reminded me of "VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action", a visual novel game I love. But it was like this "Puncline!!" picked up that ball, then just slowly put it down on the ground again, doing nothing with it. Like I mentioned in the beginning, there's a lot of heart here. You can practically feel the potential for an indie darling. But it's too undeveloped in its most important area, the dialogue. And, well, there's no gameplay.