Doki Doki Literature Club! is a free-to-play visual novel that is heavily inspired by Japanese visual novels and anime. Despite being an indie game, it looks great. The story starts off like your typical dating sim in the romantic comedy genre. You name your protagonist and meet your childhood friend Sayori before heading off to high school. She mentions that today you have to choose a club to join and why don’t you join hers. After checking it out, which is the literature club, you decide to join. There are three other members: Monika, Natsuki and Yuri, who are all cute girls. Sayori is your typical cheerful childhood friend; Monika is the club president and so she is mature and organized; Natsuki is small and has a tsundere personality; while Yuri has a mature body but is very shy.
Thus begins your normal carefree life as you spend time in the literature club. An activity that the club members decide upon is to create poems to share during club time. Each night, you’ll pick words from a list to create your poem. The words you choose for your poem will affect how much each girl likes you once you share your poem with the club the next day. It seems like it is a bright colorful story with such a cheery and upbeat atmosphere.
A playthrough is very short; although it depends on your reading speed. If you read fast you can easily finish a playthrough within two hours, otherwise it can take upwards to four hours. However, this is where the game earns its reputation as being creepy, and justifies the warning when you first start the game. It touches upon people hiding their feelings beneath their exterior and dealing with problems on the inside such as depression. The first playthrough has such a shocking ending that jumps out at you, which makes it very memorable. There are options to skip already read text which will allow you to breeze subsequent playthroughs.
A highlight of the game is how the story affects the game itself. As you play, you start to have your suspicions on what is happening. Just a note to definitely find out where the game is installed in your PC, and then check that from time to time as there is a very clever way in how the game’s story integrates with outside its world, so to speak.
There is a reason why the warning is there when you start the game. There are themes of depression and personal harm. It kind of makes a point that people can seemingly be okay on the outside but have problems that they may be hiding. While the revelation provides more light to this, it’s still a valid thought. Once you know the truth behind some of the characters, you start to read their dialogue more carefully, trying to ascertain whether it has a double meaning.
The game will break the fourth wall, and most, if not all, first time players will get the bad ending. The creepy factor of the game comes from the unexplained events that happen while you’re progressing that you do not expect. You feel like you’re losing control, and coupled with the shift of the upbeat cheery music into something that’s more at home in a horror game, it’ll send chills up your spine. The bad ending is really well done, and it manages to keep surprising you. You watch on in horror at what is happening, with no way to control or stop it.
Getting the “best ending” will take around another two hours as you have to replay the game and do specific things to fulfill the conditions. While a lot of the content is recycled, it is worthwhile both in terms of the actual story ending and also what the game’s developer was aiming to do. It does something that you completely don’t expect, and it challenges the status quo of game storytelling. It’s quite thought provoking and it’ll stick in your mind for the days after you’ve finished the game.
Overall, Doki Doki Literature Club! is definitely an experience that is unlike any other game. It lures you in unsuspectingly with its premise and cheery music, but then once you’re comfortable, does all sorts of little things here and there to cause you plenty of discomfort. The cheery music becomes creepy, even more so when you recognize it is the same tune. The characters behave differently and once the revelation of what is actually happen dawns on you, every time you play the game, you can’t help but feel that there are several layers of the game. While short by visual novel standards, it’s definitely a worthwhile experience and the horror elements aren’t that bad since its psychological horror rather than shock horror.
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