Doki Doki:
Doki Doki Literature Club: High School Romance Descends into Insanity
Doki Doki Literature Club: Insanity's Source and Themes
Time to Beat 1st Time: 3 Hours
Time to Play 2nd Time: 1 Hour
Time to Figure out how to Get the Best Ending: 4 Hours
Total Time: 8.2 Hours
Five years ago Zero Punctuation reviewed Doki Doki Literature Club!, a parody of a dating sim game.
I've never played a dating sim, but I occasionally watch anime. So despite having paid for dozens of games I still haven't played on Steam, GOG, Epic Store, or Itch.io, I played this free game (there is also a paid version that released in 2021).
Doki Doki Literature Club! is a visual novel, originally released in 2015. The opening screen warns the player that Doki Doki features disturbing content related to anxiety and depression. This clearly indicates that this game, an ostentatiously dating sim game, is actually something else.
Doki Doki, isn't a mechanically strenuous game. It's a visual novel with only a few choices for the player to make. The player controls the protagonist, an unnamed male high school student. He narrates the story as he experiences it. On the way to school his meets he best friend Sayori, a cheerful, perky girl. She invites him to join the newly created Literature Club. He doesn't want to, but the game doesn't give the player a choice. Upon arrival, he discovers that three other girls constitute the entirety of the club's membership. They need him to make it five, the minimum number for a club's existence. Noting that the club is “full of incredibly cute girls,” he agrees.
The protagonist clearly sees the opportunity to date one of the girls, but in practice the story prevents this interaction. The main character is oblivious to the fact that they are all in love with him. Whenever one of them opens up to him, or gives him an opportunity to build an emotional connection he becomes uncomfortable and pulls away. He never even considers taking advantage of them if they are in a vulnerable position, but instead helps and comforts them as a friend would.
The other three girls are Yuri, a tall shy girl that enjoys dark romantic stories, Natsuki, a short, prickly 10th grader, and Monika, the club leader. Of the four girls, the protagonist mostly engages with Sayori, Yuri, and Nat(suki). A few activities are the only choices the player makes in this linear story. The player is offered a total of four dialogue choices. For example, they choose to say whether they prefer Yuri or Nat's poem. The number one impact comes from writing poems. After each day of school, the characters agree to write a poem. The player does this by picking words from a randomly generated list. Each poem requires the player to choose one word from twenty different pages with ten choices each. The word bank is repetitive. Each girl is associated with different words. Yuri likes words that are big, deep, or related to horror. Sayori likes emotional words, related to happiness or sadness, or activities. Nat likes poems written with words that are simple or objects. Writing the poem chooses which girl to impress, and impacts who the protagonist interacts with the next day. Poems can not impress Monika, even when only two characters remain. The girls share their poems with the protagonist. The initial poems are poorly written, if compared to professional poems, but decent for high schoolers. After reading their poems the protagonist spends time with the girl he impressed most with his poem. They spend a special scene together, and later the protagonist visits their house to work on a project for the club (baking cookies or designing a banner).
Monika is an oddity. The player has limited interactions with her. She makes absurd statements. She breaks the fourth wall when she tells the player to save their game. She comments on a translation joke. She even appears to know the player was forced to join the club.
Following Monika's instructions, I saved often. I intended to go back and try other paths. But at minute 107 Doki Doki careens into disturbing absurdity. The protagonist encounters an event that causes a game error. The player sees an END screen, and is kicked out to the menu which appears glitched.
Prior to this moment Doki Doki uses an art and sound style similar to Game Boy Advance games like Phoenix Wright. It uses limited, repetitive character positions/expressions and scenery. But afterwards, while it's not revolutionary, Doki Doki deploys strange music beats and a screen with significantly expanded versatility. Its low quality was a deception, like the initial story.
It is impossible to dodge this error event. It always happens, and always to the same girl. If you tell her you love someone else, she feels abandoned, and if you tell her you love her, she feels guilty.
For the second playthrough the player should make ample use of the skip and history buttons. The skip button quickly skips through the text. Unfortunately it also skips when the girls share their poems, which is frustrating. Very little changes in the second play through, except the poems. At least, I think the poems change, but it's difficult to tell when the game skips through them.
At any point the player can click on History and can read all the text they skipped, except for the poems!
After the first END, the problem isn't only that one character is missing. The other characters act stranger and stranger until they break. Below I list a sample of deteriorating behavior:
Poems fill with horrific messages: like “playing a knife on a bleeding rib cage,” or “delete her!”
The game displays black screens with boxes that say things like “Please help me,” or merely, “yes” and “no” to select (I tried both but I'm not sure what the effect was).
One character cuts themselves, while another suffers from the effects of starvation.
There are strange squishy, chewing sounds, music cuts out and comes back with discordant notes.
Events rewind and glitch.
Characters' eyes appear demented, extended, and full of veins, with twitching pupils.
There is black dialogue (which seems to be what the character's are thinking, but it could also be another character messing with their text) – like “We are all worthless,” and “I want to pull your skin open and crawl inside of you.”
There is a source of the insanity, which will be discussed next article.
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