• Doki Doki Literature Club
  

  12 hours playtime

  no achievements

I completely dismissed this game when it showed up in my recommended Steam feed - a free, cutesy, VN dating sim? No thanks. I only played it when I read a recommendation for it on RPS, and I am very glad I did. Doki Doki is one of the best VNs I’ve ever played.

Doki Doki is a game that surprises in delightful ways. But much like other things that rely on surprise - like Memento or Pony Island - to talk or read too much about it only serves to spoil the surprises and mar your experience. It’s a game that benefits from going in as blind as possible.

But I can say that I was repeatedly delighted by the game. It was clever, entertaining, and really amusing. There’s only a handful of games that have ever made me laugh, and Doki Doki did so repeatedly. I highly recommend it, even to people that don’t like VNs. At 4 hours to complete the different routes, it’s a pretty short time commitment. You do have to pretend to be a teenage boy infatuated with four anime-styled girls, which may be a harder ask for some people than others, but it’s so worth it for the experience. The game was so good that I decided to replay it to get the hidden ending, and I’m surprised with how good the game is on a second playthrough, and all the details that I’m picking up on that I didn’t pay attention to the first time around.