Player Punch/Video Games/Visual Novel

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Examples of Player Punches in Visual Novels include:

  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: in Trials and Tribulations case 5, when Dahlia Hawthorne starts cackling about Maya's apparent suicide, and how she can't be punished for it because she's already dead. Even given that you've most likely figured the true plot out already by this point, the anger generated by this scene is part of what makes Mia and Phoenix's resultant Hannibal Lecture such a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the series.
    • Dahlia is also responsible for another Player Punch earlier:

Terry Fawles: Mister... Armando... Thanks... for the... coffee...

    • Also, Case 2-4 becomes a Player Punch right off the bat, but the salt is only sprinkled in the wound later on:

Matt Engarde: How do you do, Mr. Lawyer? I'm Matt Engarde.

    • Mia's death near the beginning of the first game works this way too. It's a bit different from this trope's norm in the sense that you don't really get a sense of how awesome she was until after she dies. In any case, Redd White is quite likely the most hated villain in the series who isn't a final case villain.
  • Planetarian It comes to punch you in the eye when you're already attached to Yumemi/Reverie
  • In the Heaven's Feel route of Fate/stay night, you're forced to select the choice that kills Saber in order to obtain the True End.
    • Choosing to let Saber live has fatal consequences for Rin, who, as a result of Saber's timely intervention, gets absorbed by Sakura as a result. She then proceeds to inflict a re-enactment of her experiences in the Matou household on Rin, and the utter horror of the scene is compounded when Sakura lets Shirou know in an arrestingly deadpan manner that Rin was a virgin, and that she's "already crying on her first day."
      • Doesn't change the fact that it's difficult to stomach killing off Shirou's first love for seemingly no reason. The related bad end is something of a Diabolus Ex Machina, coming the hell out of nowhere.
    • If that wasn't already bad enough, the True End route also has Ilya sacrifice herself; this is non-negotiable on your first play, and the worst part of it all? That innocent little jingle of hers plays as she does so, increasing the tear-inducing factor of the scene by over nine thousand.
      • Worse than this, when you do get the choice, choosing to prevent Ilya from sacrificing herself leads to the Normal end, which apart from being exceptionally depressing doesn't mention Ilya at all, implying that she probably returned to her castle to live the rest of her (short) life alone, since Shirou is dead and Sakura is far too depressed to possibly look after Ilya.
  • Clannad. When Nagisa and Tomoya want to confirm Fuko's situation by trying to get her older sister Kouko to meet her, Kouko ends up staring straight through Fuko and she says to Tomoya, "That girl stopped breathing yesterday."
    • And then there's Nagisa herself. There's a reason why the Anime decided to follow her route.
  • Early on in the survival horror visual novel Corpse Party, Naomi and Seiko unwittingly step into a pile of gore. It's played for dark laughs, but later on, we find out that the body belongs to their friend Mayu.
  • Katawa Shoujo: Basically every bad ending is this, and the game really chews out the player for it more than Hisao.
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