Update Seventy-Nine: 13 November 2017

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Oh my god you guys I ACTUALLY LIKE A GAME!

It feels like it’s been months since I’ve played a game I genuinely enjoyed, and it’s this one. Doki Doki Literature Club! is a recent kind of popular memetic game (kind of like Dream Daddy was in the summertime) and like Dream Daddy it’s actually pretty damn good on its own.

On its face, Doki Doki Literature Club! is a standard cutesy high-school dating sim. You are nameable protagonist, and you have to join a club for school. You haven’t picked one yet, and your childhood friend convinces you to try out the club she’s Vice President for - the Literature Club. You check it out, and holy shit - it’s made up of cute girls! You join the Literature Club.

The main mechanic isn’t just making choices, it’s writing poems You’re presented with a list of words and you pick twenty of them to generate a ‘poem’ (you never see these). The three girls like different words, and the more words you pick one character likes, the more they’ll end up liking your poem when you present it. Through this mechanic, you pick which route you get to go down, and which girl you’ll get close to.

There’s no avoiding the inevitable outcome, though.

I’d really recommend this to anybody, beyond the people described in its content warnings. (By the way, I am THRILLED that this game is so up front with its content warnings, even if it kind of lessens the impact of the actual game) It’s FREE!! and does interesting things with the visual novel as a genre and with the ren.py engine as a medium. It’s a very meta game in the same vein as, like, Stanley Parable and Undertale and it does it well. I heard people complaining about reading the girls’ poems, but I think they were all really good! The game isn’t too long, either, about 3-4 hours each playthrough.

I’m going to go on now to talk about spoilers below - if you’re planning on playing this game, skip this! Play it!

The second act of the game - basically your ‘second’ playthough - is done really, really well. I loved the glitches, how the game breaks down, and how the characters are twisted and warped.

I just ended up not really liking Monika. I felt that there had been a lot of set up, but not a lot of pay off. The player doesn’t get to get inside her head - she never describes what it’s like to become sentient, to learn how to fuck with the game files, and she’s ‘beaten’ too easily. I was let down, like, ‘oh…. that’s it?’ That could have been the point, but it didn’t work very well.

In fact, the most emotional part of the game was the ending song - especially hearing her talk (literally talk, she’s voice-acted) about how this song is the song she was working on in the game, to the player, and that song looks into her perspective and you get to see what she was feeling and where she was coming from. I loved it, and it made me like her a lot more. I just wish I got that IN the narrative rather than at the very very end.

The concept of non-romanceable side character rising up and taking control is thrilling and fascinating and I’m really glad this game has been made.

I have added Doki Doki Literature Club! to my Visual Novel Masterlist!

Next up: The ‘Answer’ arcs are my favorite parts of the game - that’s why I’m excited to play -

See you soon!