Doki Doki Literature Club Platforms

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This game is best experienced spoiler-free. Since this is a review, there will inevitably be spoilers, though I’ll try to avoid too many specifics – that is, until section 8 of this post, where I dive into much deeper detail. If you don’t want anything ruined for you, play the game before reading on. If you’re sure you don’t mind, then please proceed …

PLATFORMS

Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux

IN A NUTSHELL

Doki Doki Literature Club Platforms For Beginners

The Literature Club is full of Monika! Will you write the way into her heart? Doki Doki Literature Club General Discussions Topic Details. Dec 8, 2019 @ 3:38am What engine is this game made on? I want to try my own hand at a. Doki Doki Literature Club! Is a visual novel, so the majority of the gameplay consists of the player reading the game's story. At certain points in the game the player is prompted to make decisions which may affect how the story progresses. The game also features a poetry writing mechanic as part of the literature club. Inspired by doki doki literature club, you enter a seemingly peaceful world and quickly make friends within a neat little games club. You soon find out however that all is not what it seems. Warning: 18+ This game covers some dark themes and is not for the faint of heart. Doki Doki Literature Club Fan Pack $9.99 Add all DLC to Cart. About This Game Hi, Monika here! Welcome to the Literature Club! It's always been a dream of mine to.

Poetry and pretty anime girls have never been so disturbing.

Doki Doki Literature Club Platforms
CONTENT WARNINGS

Doki Doki Literature Club! has some very disturbing content. Please heed the following message from the game: “Individuals suffering from anxiety or depression may not have a safe experience playing this game. For content warnings, please visit: http://ddlc.moe/warning.html”

Doki Doki Literature Club Story

Game Review/Analysis

CONTENTS

1. Love Me | Dating Sim

2. Save Me | Horror

3. Load Me | Postmodernism

4. The Cute and the Not-So-Cute | Art & Graphics

5. Warping Melodies | Music & Sound

6. Write Your Way | Poetry

7. Inside My Head | Themes

8. Portrait of Markov | A Certain Theory …

Bet you never thought you’d see the words “postmodern”, “horror”, and “dating sim” strung together – especially not in reference to the picture above. Absurd as it seems, Doki Doki Literature Club! is all that and more. For those of you who haven’t played or heard about it, you might look at the game’s screenshots and trailer and wonder why you should take this game seriously. Isn’t it just anime-style visual novel dating sim fluff? You might also be thoroughly confused about its 10/10 rating on Steam and about how it won the 2017 IGN People’s Choice awards for “Best PC Game”, “Best Story”, “Most Innovative”, and even “Best Adventure Game” (I’m still pretty stumped on that last one, to be honest). There’s evidently more to it than meets the eye. As we hear in the game itself, “don’t judge a book by its cover”.

This game fascinated me. I previously talked about games venturing into the Land of the Experimental and Strange, and Team Salvato may just have built its throne there with Doki Doki Literature Club!. Let me tell you why.

1. Love Me

The game’s first half pans out like your typical Japanese visual novel/dating sim. You’re an average guy, coasting through your average high school life. Your close friend and neighbour, Sayori, drags you into joining the after-school Literature Club, where you meet other potential love interests. Each exhibit stereotypical anime girl traits: Sayori is sweet and sunny; Natsuki is the cute one with a spunky attitude and is clearly a “tsundere” (i – it’s not like she likes you or anything!); Yuri is shy, bookish, and mysterious; and Monika is the club president and perfect all-rounder. As time passes, you learn more about the girls, win them over (or drive them away) with your poetry, and help the club prepare for the upcoming school festival. All seems well – for now.

Club

If it carried on as a dating sim all the way through, it would probably earn a solid 7/10 from me. The poetry mechanic is an innovative and fitting element of gameplay – after each club meeting, you go home and compose a poem by selecting a bunch of words, each of which correspond to a particular club member. Your choices dictate who you spend time with during the next club meeting, and who will be most impressed by your poem. To get the desired result, you must pay attention to each girl’s preferences. The only disappointment is that you don’t actually get to read the finished products. (I’d be really curious to read a poem that combined the words “heavensent”, massacre”, and “boop”.)

The characters, despite their initial flatness, are likeable and gradually show more depth. It’s enjoyable to watch their personalities and quirks emerge as scenes unfold.

The scenes themselves are hit and miss. Some are humourous or touching and spark interest (with a healthy dose of foreshadowing), while others feel like inconsequential filler that leaves you wanting to speed-click through the dialogue to get to the “interesting part”.

But when that “interesting part” finally hits, you might just start wishing you could go back to the cutesy fluff.

Doki Doki Literature Club Platforms

2. Save Me

Club

Once you reach that turning point, the frothy façade fizzles away, and things turn real strange, real fast. I went into Doki Doki Literature Club! knowing it was a horror game, but the exact route it took surprised me.

Sure, there are jump scares, and some of them are what you’d expect from a horror game – the type of nightmare fuel that your brain will thoughtfully recall just as you’re trying to fall asleep. But others are more unusual, more unnerving. They give a sense of wrongness that may not make you scream in terror, but will make your skin crawl. This game’s brand of horror is at once more cunning and creepier than what you’d expect. It’s scary creative.

Although “dating sim” and “horror game” seem to be polar opposites, the first and second halves of the game are not disjointed – a thread binds them together, fostering coherence between the two. And that thread is the running theme of “love”. It first manifests as something playful and naïve, only to be twisted grotesquely in the second half of the game. The horror of Doki Doki Literature Club! revolves around love in it most demented and destructive form. The game’s take on a usually pleasant subject, along with its deformation of the dating sim format, are master strokes – blindsiding players and making us rethink what we define as “horror”.

3. Load Me

I’m not going to get too theoretical here, but I am going to use “postmodernism” as an umbrella term to discuss some of the weird and wonderful techniques that Doki Doki Literature Club! uses to disarm (and alarm) us.

Most conspicuous of all is its insistent self-awareness. The Stanley Parable punched through the fourth wall, Undertale shattered it to pieces, and now Doki Doki Literature Club! has crept right through the hole in the wall and caused chaos. Not only does the game refer to itself as a game (which can be disconcerting in itself); it pushes things further. Just as the postmodern novels might play with their medium by messing around with formatting and colour, so does Doki Doki Literature Club! exploit to an extreme the fact that it is a computer game. If you keep an eye on your game folder while playing, you’ll notice suspicious files appearing, disappearing, and altering. The game is making changes to your computer itself, in accordance with your progression through the story.

As a horror device, it’s incredibly effective. Most works of horror amplify your paranoia by trying to flicker the barrier between themselves and your reality. Many horror stories choose ordinary, everyday settings to give the sense that the terrors they describe could invade your own ordinary, everyday life. Horror games in virtual reality are so much more petrifying because they are no longer contained on a screen; they seem to surround you and fill your senses. Similarly, with Doki Doki Literature Club!, things do not stay where they should. They creep in and out of your game folder as they please, sometimes leaving a freaky message or image for you to find. The game addresses you – not the character you play as, but you the player – and it chillingly cites information you didn’t even know it had. The horrors of the game invade your digital reality.

More than that, the game’s toying with the medium wrests control from the player. Many horror games hinder your control over situations to make you feel more helpless (and hence more scared). They might deny you weapons for self-defence, limit the amount of available light, or restrict your movement, as we see in games like Five Nights at Freddy’s and Neverending Nightmares. Doki Doki Literature Club! has a more startling way of hindering your control – it breaks itself. Your choices cease to matter. You can’t rely on the safety net of a previous save because saving and loading don’t work as they should anymore. You are no longer in control of the game; it controls you.

There is another postmodern feature in this game – perhaps the one used most brilliantly – and that is “intertextuality”: the presence of other works (or “texts”) within the game. This has to do with some of those freaky messages we find in our game folder and elsewhere, but more on that later …

4. The Cute and the Not-So-Cute

At first, the art style seems quite standard for a Japanese visual novel – pretty, bright, and polished. Its characters are decked out in the usual trappings of an anime school girl: cute uniforms, violet or bubblegum pink hair, unnecessary accessories (yes, I’m talking about that useless ribbon-clip in Natsuki’s fringe) – but as a fan of anime and manga (and useless accessories), I can’t fault the art or character design. The backgrounds, too, are nicely rendered, with lighting that enhances the atmosphere. Doki Doki Literature Club! is a good-looking game …

… Until it starts collapsing in on itself. The graphics crack into glitchy, haunted versions of themselves – and very observant players may at times notice something odd about the backgrounds. For those of you who haven’t seen these parts of the game yet, I’ll let you discover them for yourself. Let’s just say they grab your attention. It’s amazing how a few modifications can turn the girls of your dreams into the girls of your nightmares.

5. Warping Melodies

As with the art and graphics, the music starts off as innocently as can be, lulling unsuspecting souls into a false sense of security. It’s boppy and cheery and ridiculously catchy – seriously, I’ve had these songs stuck in my head for days now. As a deft extra touch, the music also reinforces the personalities of the girls. Each time a girl’s poem is shown on the screen, the main melody is inflected with a different sound: breezy for Sayori, playful for Natsuki, elegant for Yuri, and solo piano for Monika. What’s more impressive is that Dan Salvato, the founder of Team Salvato, not only conceptualised, designed, programmed, and wrote Doki Doki Literature Club!, but composed these tunes too. (Talk about multi-talented!)

Once the horror kicks in, however, the cheery tunes become distorted and hollow. Like creepy lullabies, they intensify the feeling of “wrongness” seeping through the rest of the game. Sometimes the music is punctured by manic giggling, or gives way completely to the sound of a heartbeat (and not in a way that the “dating sim” disguise would lead us to expect). The degenerating music and sound effects in the game definitely succeed in making us players squirm.

6. Write Your Way

Despite all the madness, the game reminds us that we’re still in a literature club. There’s actually some useful writing advice and discussion that may be valuable to all you writers out there. But I want to pause briefly on the game’s poems in particular.

Each club meeting ends with poem-sharing time, where you get to read each of the girls’ poems. This is a fairly normal affair during the first half of the game. As poetry can be used to express what is hidden beneath the surface, the poems are clever inclusions that add depth to the characters, giving further insight into the girls’ minds – and more specifically, the darker facets of their personalities that will later evolve to full form. The poems play a crucial part in foreshadowing.

Of course, the poems later become … less conventional, shall we say? I didn’t think I could be spooked by poetry, of all things, but this game manages to do a lot of things I could never have foreseen. Just make sure that you pay close attention – there may be secrets hiding between those lines.

7. Inside My Head

In case you couldn’t guess from all the content warnings, Doki Doki Literature Club! is no light-hearted romp. Without spoiling too much, there are serious themes that deserve some consideration in this review. Other pieces of media have come under fire for handling such issues inappropriately, by treating them disrespectfully or glamourising them in some instances. There is a tricky balance to strike between raising awareness and harm or exploitation.

Horror stories frequently take dark themes as their subject matters, such as murder and torture, and these are usually used as elements of the genre to frighten and disturb. Doki Doki Literature Club!’s portrayal of its darker themes – most prominently those pertaining to mental health – does at times shock the player and contribute significantly to the “horror” of the work; but it balances this with surprising sensitivity for a horror game. Its portrayal of its characters encourage sympathy and understanding, not only fear. If you’re patient enough to hear the game out, it has some pretty poignant messages about being more attentive, more caring, and kinder to others – and to yourself as well.

8. Portrait of Markov

If you haven’t played the game yet, this is a good time to turn back or skip to the conclusion because this whole section is MASSIVE SPOILER TERRITORY. So spoiler-y, in fact, that I’ve chucked it onto a separate page. If you’re absolutely sure you want to read on, then click here for the 8th bit of this post, where we move on to a certain game theory …

Doki Doki Literature Club Background

And there you have it: possibly the weirdest game I’ve played to date. Thank you, Team Salvato, for the weirdness. Thank you for blowing my mind. Un-thank you for the nightmares. I can’t wait to see what you come up with next.