2018: Doki Doki Literature Club
Doki Doki Literature Club
Release Date Developer Publisher 22 Sep 2017 Team Salvato Team Salvato
This is one of the strangest games I’ve played. Before spoiling anything, I want to call out that the game is free and a fairly short (~4 hour) experience. I would recommend against reading into spoilers about the game, though be warned there is some graphic self-harm content (which will be very not obvious from the vibe of the game).
Doki Doki can be a hard game to talk about, since the game is a meta-heavy experience with multiple plots:
- The Plot: The story that happens to the characters as part of the visual novel game. The protagonist joins a high school literature club and writes poems in a thinly-veiled dating sim.
- The Meta Plot: The story that occurs between playthroughs of the game. Monika, the club’s leader (but not an option in the dating sim) gains sentience and modifies the game’s code to profess her love for the human player of the game.
The plot follows all the tropes of a visual novel. The poems you write are clearly meant to reflect the objectified character traits of the different love interests in the club. Your childhood friend professes her love to the protagonist on the first day of the game. The game’s assets are polished and hide the game’s horror/thriller meta-plot nicely inside of a cutesy anime game.
The meta plot shows the destructive nature of obsession and our flaws. The characters in the game are manipulated by Monika to showcase the extremes of their negative traits, poisoning the relationships the player forms during the visual novel. They’re eventually driven to killing themselves or deleted by Monika until she’s the only option remaining. In a way, the dating sim shell still did what is was meant to do — romance the player — but in a creepy twist on the genre.
To me, this game is noteworthy since its such a labor of love; it feels like it shouldn’t exist. A free, visual-novel game where you learn — via playing the extremely well-produced shell — that one of the personas is killing the others in order to be your favorite? Weird, fresh, and I’m there.
Since playing, they have released a “Plus” version of the game with additional storylines and endings, though I haven’t tried it yet. I’m not sure how much would be modified from the main story (or how they’d make certain mechanics work on the Switch, for example) but perhaps it’s worth revisiting after my trip here down memory lane.