Doki Doki Literature Club!

Trigger warning: This review and game are not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed suffer from depression, suicidal thoughts, ideations of self-harm, abuse or who cannot stand to watch those topics in a work of fiction. This game’s store page has a short warning that undersells its contents, but the game (which I will spoil) is more direct when you begin playing it.

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I kinda hate writing about games that base themselves entirely off of their big twist. Not so much because of the twists themselves, but because in this day and age of the Internet, it’s not long until everybody knows about them. I can think of several games for which this happened, from Undertale to the more recent Inscryption. Doki Doki Literature Club!, developed and published by Team Salvato and released on September 22nd, 2017, is one of those.

I’ll wager that you’ve read the title and instantly went, “oh right, that’s the game with the…”? And no, I am not finishing that sentence (yet), but I bet you’ve gotten it right. It’s not so much that I have a thing against spoilers, it’s that many works are deliberately constructed with the idea of a shocking twist for the audience to discover, but learning about said twist can dampen the enjoyment of the product. The keyword is “Can”, not “Will”.

Obviously, this applies to films. Good luck finding someone
who doesn't know the twist to Fight Club, the 1999 film;
the lead-up to the reveal has dozens of little clues, nods and
dialog lines that only become clear on repeated viewings.

Anything that has a twist can be great to re-experience with that knowledge as you can seek out little clues and hints that were dropped beforehand. I feel that’s especially true if you did discover the twist on your own. Going in “not blind” isn’t necessarily bad, either. Sure, you may know the shocking swerve that’s coming, but in this art, said twist itself is but a piece; and it’s all the legwork to get to it that can help make it shine more. The worst type of twist or surprise is the one that barges in unannounced, coming out of nowhere, with no rhyme or reason with what came before. It’s been seen. I don’t always mind hearing about the big twist to the story as the journey towards it makes the destination worthwhile.

She overslept again? I'm gonna start believing
something's not quite right with her. Or maybe
her alarm clock is just bad.

On the other hand, knowing in advance can play tricks on the viewer, who might then actively search for the clues as they experience the work, rather than letting themselves get immersed in the experience and figure everything out on a second viewing. Video games, in particular, are subject to this due to being interactive media. Going through a game with a twist for the first time and trying to trigger the twist or any hints of it from the get-go? Yeah, that happens. Thankfully, development studios can be quite clever about it and throw you off-track if you seem to play with the goal in mind to trigger the twist before you’ve seen the entire story.

But I won’t lie, this was me as I played through Doki Doki Literature Club!, a game that starts out as a cute and semi-innocent game about a guy joining a literature club full of girls and getting invested in the group. Just a lovely little dating visual novel. A sweet façade… hiding something deeply macabre.

The heartbeat

Despite its attempt at hiding its true mood, the game nonetheless starts with a warning advising that people suffering from anxiety or depression may not have a safe experience with it. Well, that's leagues better than the "children and people who are easily disturbed" line!

According to the dev Dan Salvato, all the girls
are 18; I highly doubt that.

You play an ordinary student at a school. You have no interest in joining school clubs, but your bubbly childhood friend Sayori ropes you into joining the Literature Club. The club only has three other members, all girls: Yuri, the shy and reserved one; Natsuki, the… “tsundere” I believe the term is? That’s basically how she acts anyway; and Monika, the club president. After agreeing to join, you take part in the activities. The topic of poems is brought up and Monika challenges everyone to come up with a poem for the next day.

Okay, would you like them more freeform, as slam,
like a song, or in French alexandrines?

Each day of the story ends with a mini-game in which you pick 20 words to make a poem. Each word has a romance option attached to it (Sayori, Yuri or Natsuki – Monika isn’t even among them). And little chibi versions of the characters will react when you choose a word that fits their preferences. As a result, depending on how you build your poem, it will appeal more to the one who reacted the most to your choices. Simple enough, right? But we already have hints of what’s to come.

Like some of the words available.

Color, vivid, sunny, daydream... su-wait. What the actual H-

I’m not gonna like where this is going, I can tell.

Ah, her and her need to put everyone before
herself... that's Sayori for ya.

You get to know the other girls better through their poems, what they’re like, what they really think. If you are already aware of the game’s spoilers, you can read a lot of clues regarding their stability in the poems they share. Monika’s, in particular, are very interesting with knowledge of what comes later, but the others are subtler. Every once in a while, though, the appearances fail and the truths slip by, showing that the girls of the club are all dealing with their own personal issues. As the first week passes, the Literature Club decides to advertise itself at the club festival on the following Monday, meant to represent the point where you choose one of the girls to properly “date”, basically.

The story is also often intercut with scenes known as
"Character Graphics", full images denoting a more
personal interaction with the girl. In this case, Sayori,
who bruised her head against a cupboard.

And then Yuri takes out a pocket knife and proceeds to
lay out a dozen implications that she uses them
in worrisome ways.

That… never happens. In order to prepare for the festival, you meet with either Natsuki or Yuri to prepare one aspect of the club’s festival presentations (food or decoration, respectively). Your choices do change the path you take in the story, with the occasional tough choice that leads the story in a different direction. There is one constant, however: Something’s wrong with Sayori. She’s not her bubbly self, even around the player character. She eventually comes forward and admits to suffering from a nasty form of depression that doesn’t make her feel anything despite her best attempts, leading to her faking emotion towards everyone. The only one she feels anything for is the player character, and seeing him get involved with the others, perhaps romantically even, is too much for her to bear. It doesn’t matter whether you declare your love to her or say she’s just a friend…

(This is your last warning. The next image is the big spoiler, the big shock. If you are okay with it, you can keep scrolling down. It's only going to get worse from here.)

The morning of the festival, you find her hanged in her room. The End.

Yeah.

I know.

…Yeah.

………………………………………………………I KNOW.

A void

....O-kay...

Well, I'd better close this and send a bug report
to the devs.

You can start playing through this story again, but you’ll soon notice a disturbing lack of Sayori. Her name is swapped with garbage letters, scenes where she’d normally appear glitch out, even her sprite on the title screen is checkered with Monika’s. Your in-game saves are gone, too. This time, Monika is the one who brings you to the club – no mention of Sayori anywhere. The first day seems to go well. During the second one, though, cracks start to appear. More glitches are present. And with a void to fill there, Yuri got an upgrade to “most likely love interest”.

She’s taking it well!

….don’t look at me like that.

This is just before the game resets to a less
traumatic part. I normally make jokes, but
this time, no. If you cut yourself like this,
seek help. See a psychiatrist, and if you can't,
there are hotlines you can call. I feel it's
insulting that this game uses it for horror.

And oh yeah, implications are piling up that Natsuki’s being abused at home, has low self-esteem, and shows traits associated to post-traumatic stress disorder. So add that to the pile. Oh, and while Yuri was displaying some odd traits in Act 1, like a fascination for horror and knives… well, she's turned into someone who reads intensely dark and graphic horror novels and gets sexual satisfaction from cutting herself. Yes. I know. And since she’s grown an uncomfortable level of lusty desire for the visual novel’s protagonist…

Meanwhile, Monika is more and more showing signs that she knows she’s in a game, and that she might have provoked all that’s going on. This culminates in Yuri committing seppuku ON-SCREEN, and then you’re stuck looking at her corpse for several hundred boxes of garbled, glitched text (that you can mercifully skip through, but it will still take at least one full minute during which you see Yuri’s body decaying to a corpse, more if you don't see the Skip option is open).

..................................................................YIKES.

Great, now the screen is red, pulsating like flesh,
with red bars like veins. Something's broken.
...even more than before, I mean.

Glitches have taken over this Act, from the screen going blood-red to characters appearing over the text, blocking the view, the screen tilting or turning to static. Whatever that reality is, it’s dying. And after the scene with Yuri, Monika appears, realizes that the player was stuck “all weekend” staring at the body, and makes things easy by outright deleting Yuri and Natsuki’s character files, and resetting the game again.

Just Monika

For Act 3, the game doesn’t even bother with the title screen. Right away, you get Monika, eye-to-eye with you. Not you the player character. You, the player. Addressing you. And sure, it’s the sort of fourth wall break that’s already been done. She talks about how she corrupted the game itself by changing how the characters behave – worsening Sayori’s depression towards suicide and Yuri’s borderline personality disorder into a straight-up yandere… Let’s put a pin in that, I’ll return to it.

Y'know, I heard of cyber-stalkers before, but I don't think
that's what the phrase normally means.

Where the game does something unique is that Monika displays her greater knowledge of “you”. She knows which platform you’ve been playing the game on, your OS user account name on your computer, and whether you’re recording her… and on the latter, if you are recording her like I was in order to grab screenshots, she’ll assume you’re streaming yourself playing, so she’ll at least have the decency of not giving away the sensitive information of your OS user name. That’s some foresight from the devs. If that’s not creepy enough, she admits to being behind every glitch that happened in the game as well: She wanted the player for herself the whole time because she knew the person behind was “real”, and since she wasn’t an option, she rewrote the game from within using her limited means, thus causing the errors. She even says how she removed the others: By accessing your game’s directory folder and “deleting” the characters from their associated folder, leaving only herself.

Also note how Act 3 only has one picture screen
the entire time. Lots of text, and dark stuff
passing outside the windows, but other than
that? Just Monika, eye-to-eye with you.

I’ll give the game credit there, what it does is fascinating. Not only does it specifically instruct you to look at the game’s directory, it also shows you how you can influence the game. Through Acts 1 and 2, the directory might change, adding or removing files (images or .txt). Some of them are written like they were from Monika, implying she’s attempting to communicate beyond the game. Doki Doki Literature Club is “Baby’s first horror augmented reality game”, encouraging you to investigate files to solve the "puzzle" therein. Go beyond what you’re shown to actually understand what’s happening.

The only time she ever gives you a choice is when she asks whether you’ll date her. The only option is “yes”. Shame on her, she couldn’t even be cheeky about it and have all options be “yes”, “certainly”, “please” and “for sure”! After that, she’ll cycle through 15 dialogues, with no way to speed through. Leave the game? Nope, the sequence will start over when you return. To defeat her, you have to do just like she did, and delete her character file from the directory. She glitches and curses you, then on next bootup she has realized her mistake, apologizes for it, and chooses to bring everyone else back, minus her.

The… heartbeat?

The game will reset with everyone else having returned. Sayori is now the club’s president and still gets the player character to join the club, with Yuri and Natsuki back to normal as well. The presentations go as normal, the latter two leave… and Sayori reveals that with Monika gone (something she acknowledges), she has gained the same level of consciousness regarding the real world. She’s about to trap you in the exact same situation as Act 3, but a remnant of Monika intervenes before forcing the end credits, also deleting stuff from the game to render it unplayable for good. Only one thing remains if you reboot the game: A poem.

If you want to replay the game proper, you’ll need to uninstall and reinstall it first. This is the main ending, but several more can be found. The best ending is obtainable by seeing all of the characters’ graphics, which mostly involves going through the three love interest girls’ routes at the same time using the Save/Load features, equating to playing Act 1 at least three times, before the point of no return that would normally be Sayori's death screen.

The serious talk

Time for that pin.

Okay, so you know what’s been bothering me this whole time? Originally I was taking issue with the warnings being milquetoast for the heaviness of the topics within, but I replayed the game from scratch (I had to reinstall the game in order to start over) and there is a stricter warning upon first bootup that advises people suffering from depression or anxiety from playing. Yeah, I can at least get behind that – the game is honest, so if you choose to play it anyway, you’ve been warned.

That said, it will take nearly two hours of playtime before the first big shock of the game. To its credit, the story pulls no punches in portraying Sayori’s depression (and her attempts to hide it) as realistically as possible, but it’s only the most blatant one. Fans have studied the behaviors of the girls and their statements in Act 1, and the psychological traits that are noticeably amplified by Monika’s tampering of the code in Act 2 are already present beforehand, only portrayed more realistically. In hindsight, Yuri’s turn from a reserved girl with odd characteristics into a yandere is almost insulting (and, I repeat, you have to stare at her post-seppuku corpse for at least a minute, possibly more), but the first act is spot-on regarding her borderline personality disorder. Of course, unless you’re aware of the game’s deconstruction of stereotypical anime/dating visual novel tropes into mental disorders, you might not notice the hints while the game is behaving somewhat normally.

Even Monika is exhibiting clear signs of narcissism. As for Natsuki? Her tsundere mood swings are caused by the neglect she suffers, and she’s implied to be eating a lot at school because she doesn’t get enough to eat at home.

"Doki Doki Literature Club"? More like
"Doki Doki Seriously Y'all Need Therapy Club".

It’s heavy stuff that I feel gets severely undermined by the fourth wall-breaking horror turns the game takes in the latter half, and could have made for a great deconstruction of romance visual novels on its own. Not that the horror B-side isn't interesting in its own way, but it's a sharp turn into something completely different, taking the air out of the first part and erodes its message. In fact, some fans agree with this and made a mod that turns the game into a more straightforward visual novel, focusing on the commentary on mental health but retaining a slight metafictional edge. It focuses on trying to help the girls with their issues, showing that although it may not be simple to frequent someone with either of these disorders, it is possible to help them or to find help for them nonetheless.

And all these traits regarding mental health make this one of the few games where I not only am fine spoiling, but also anyone who wants to play should have some of the events spoiled to them so that they can tell whether they want to play it – that way, they’ll know that the warnings at the start of the game are no joke.

Final thoughts

With that out of the way, I do think that this is a good game, though it definitely needs that asterisk with a big content warning attached to it. The story starts out deceptively cute only to become a slow burn as things get dire, only to go completely off the rails and deep into psychological and metafictional horror. And that aspect, most prevalent during the second act, goes all-in. One could argue that the game doesn’t necessarily do anything new regarding the visual glitches, but I argue it’s the increasing frequency and worsening effects that make it so effective. I can’t say I’m a fan of all the choices made for the story, but I can understand why the plot uses them.

The graphics are very good (or… well… the character graphics are pretty good and the regular sprites are alright – the glitches range from mundane to utterly deranged). The music is good as well, going from joyful to haunting. And since this is horror, of course it’ll go off-key whenever appropriate. It’s the combination of all these elements – story, graphics, effects, ambiance and music – that make this such a bizarre experience.

The game does try to surprise with some choices,
like in this case where the cursor is unable to stay
on the Natsuki or Monika options without moving
away from them, forcing you to select Yuri.

My biggest issue probably stems from there being so little “game” to speak of. You’re not very frequently given options that will change the story in a significant manner. The “basic” game follows a very strict act structure that you’ll follow the first time you play, in order to get the most common ending. In that story, even the most decisive changes don’t seem to matter – Sayori and Yuri kill themselves, then Monika takes over. You don’t really get a different path unless you know exactly where to look or how to get there, such as how to get the Golden Ending.

Your biggest input, therefore, lies in the poetry mini-game. This is where you can appeal more to one girl over the others – usually by choosing 20 words associated to only one of them. This can lead to ne scenes focusing on either girl, which is extra content to look for; but outside of that, you don’t get to do much, unfortunately. That said, if all you want is a crazy, freaky ride that doesn’t require your input too much, DDLC will provide. Just be mindful of its themes and events, as not everyone can play a game containing them. Oh, and the horror, too; there’s plenty that I didn’t mention there.

Oh, and poems. Of all kinds. Mostly freeform.
Nobody tried alexandrines? I'm disappointed.

The original game on Steam is free, but Team Salvato has since released DDLC Plus, a priced version that adds bonus content such as side-stories between the members of the Club. My advice? Try the free game, get the Plus version if you really enjoy the base game.

Quick reviews will begin soon!