Doki Doki Literature Club

[Content warning: depicted violence, suicide.]

In Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC), you’re invited to join your neighbour’s tiny after school club, the literature club. Even though your only exposure to literature is reading manga, the club members themselves are each compelling in their own way.

Much has been written about this game, by people who are much more familiar with visual novels than I am, so I won’t feign familiarity with the conventions of the visual novel genre. But judging from this game alone, it seems that visual novels, like parser games, are good at signalling inevitability. Unlike parser games, they can do this with long stretches of dialogue-heavy storytelling without any choices. DDLC uses this to its advantage, using its episodic format to set patterns and break them.

This game is deliberately vague in its advertising about its content warnings, since those are spoilers in themselves. These are big heavy subjects that the game mentions, though, and it’s mostly used as plot point rather than being discussed.

Some gripes, then. Some of the story elements didn’t feel gelled together. In particular the poetry-writing felt like a flimsy justification for the premise. Additionally, the way this story handles mental illness is pretty superficial - more plot point than anything else. This attitude is endemic in horror fiction in general. We can do better.

DDLC is probably more worth playing for seeing how the visual novel format can be subverted than for its actual storyline, and for its questioning of the divide between player-character and player. It displays some clever tricks, but tends to use violence and mental illness as a shock tactic. Lynnea Glasser’s Creatures Such as We also explores such metatextual issues, but far more thoughtfully.

I was making a game that had some thematic elements in common with this one, from what I'd heard, so I wanted to try it out.

Pretty much everything about this game is a spoiler, so I'll describe the non-spoilery parts first.

The idea is that you are a highschool boy who's long-time friend and neighbor Sayori has invited you to join a club with her and three other girls. When you do so, you find that all four members have their own insecurities, but are each in their own way soothed by your presence and attracted to you.

Like most visual novels, text is split up into short chunks with different character poses per chunk. In this specific novel, there is a pretty large gap between choices. I saved often, as I was clicking fast to keep the game's text speed around the same as my reading speed, but didn't want to use 'auto' or fast text due to some text that disappears quickly. The main forms of interaction are choosing the order to talk to people, choosing who to spend time with (rare), and writing poems.

Poem-writing takes the form of 20 or so pages of words. On the other side of the screen are chibis of several characters. When you click a word a character likes, they jump up excitedly. Once you've written your poem, whichever character jumped the most enjoys listening to it the most.

You have about a whole week's worth of meetings and poems and chances to get to know the person you're interested in. This is all part of Act 1 out of 4. There are hints that something else is going on; Monika, the leader, refers to some out-of-game concepts like saving and loading, and all of the girls in the club hint at some darker sides to their lives.

Spoiler time:

Moderate spoilers (gives away general concept and discusses act II and the dramatic end of Act I)

(Spoiler - click to show)
By the end of Act I, your neighbor Sayori ends up hanging herself, with the character of the music and game presentation distinctly changing.

In Act II, the game resets itself and you play again, but without Sayori. This causes some logical changes in the game world, but we also see more glitches, with some text replaced with a strange bold black font with pink background. The characters you interact with are shown in more and more awful situations.


Full spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)It turns out Monika, the president of the club, is aware of the fourth wall and of your existence as a player, and of the files in the game. She spurs the others to suicide and deletes their 'character files' from the game (as you can check in your OS). You end up floating in a void world with her unless you delete her own character file, which ends up setting up a new world that has its own problems in the brief act 4.


Discussion of the concepts:
(Spoiler - click to show)The game has a lot in common with other popular meta-games of the 2010's like Undertale that address the player directly and show awareness of existing in a game (although such games have existed for a long time). The long Act I, though, with very few 'unusual' events, requires a way to keep the player invested and involved. Ironically, then, in trying to make a good setup for a 'twist', the first act of this game is probably one of the better 'traditional' visual novels, especially since so many other popular visual novels have some kind of major twist in them.

To create horror, this game uses several techniques popular in game creepypastas and horror films, like:
-Use of realistic graphics when 'fake' graphics have been the norm
-making the player think their computer is glitching
-establishing norms for what characters can do and then breaking them (like 4th wall breaking)
-using content inappropriate for the rating level initially established (like strong profanity, sexual references, and graphic deaths and mutilation)

Overall, it was effective in the presentation of these concepts. There is some need to suspend disbelief, though; we see Monika primarily motivated by an annoyance that the player never chooses her; however, choosing her is not an option. This is mentioned in-game, though, so it's not exactly a plothole, more like a Greek tragedy.


There is some content, especially violence and self-harm, that I generally am not comfortable with. In this case, I was well pre-warned, but had another factor that made it less shocking. I tend to immerse myself in characters in interactive fiction or text adventures, which makes shocking events more upsetting, but I did not identify with the main character at all here. He's written with a strong voice and makes a lot of comments and decisions I never would; I know that's common in a lot of games, but I feel like it was even stronger than usual in this game, as if we were never meant to identify with him. I felt at arms-length the whole game.

This game has high production values. I'd give it 5 stars, but I don't intend on replaying.