VN Talk: Doki Doki Literature Club

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Windows (also on Mac)
Release: 2017

Doki Doki Literature Club is a pay-what-you-want indie visual novel that got really popular in late 2017, persuading a lot of people who aren't inclined to play visual novels to check it out, especially since it's a relatively short playthrough so it can be done in a single day.

It starts like a typical harem game with a feckless male protagonist who the player gets to name, but after about two hours of that, it careens into much darker territory and messes with your head. There's a content warning on this game for a reason. But aside from that, the less you know going in, the better it's supposed to be. So if you might see yourself playing this, stop reading now.

From here on, there were be spoilers.

If there's anything I'd fault the game for, it's take a little long to get to the point. Your protagonist has been best friends with a girl named Sayori since childhood, and as typical for the genre, the pair are extremely close for being of the opposite sex and have some unresolved sexual tension going on since obviously she likes him and he doesn't think about it. Sayori gets him to join the titular Literature Club, which is only composed of girls, and each day he's tasked with writing a poem based on a selection of words that might lead him towards crafting a poem that one of the girls in the club will like.

This first run through the game plays the romance visual novel almost entirely straight, except for the ending, which is when the game's true genre comes out. I knew going in that this would eventually turn into a horror game, which is why I played it, but I didn't realize it would take as long as it did to get there. Not being a fan of romance visual novels aimed at heterosexual men, it was rough going that first time through.

But towards the end of it, it became clear that something was going on with Sayori. She begins to draw away and in a nice twist, we find out that the reason she's always late to school in the morning isn't because she's lazy and oversleeping, but that she suffers from depression. Not that she's just have a bad day, but severe clinical depression where just living everyday is a trial and she's been trying to hide her condition to avoid inconveniencing the people around her.

She introduced the protagonist to the Literature Club because she thought it would be good for him, but she's also torn because he's been a source of stability in her life. Now that he has other friends their own relationship is changing. Sayori wants things to go back to the way they were, but knows they can't, and that the protagonist is possibly interested in one of the other girls. (In my playthrough he was definitely angling for someone else.)

This comes to a head when Sayori tries to give him a love confession and the player has to choice of reciprocating her love or confirming that she will always be his dearest friend. Reciprocating, if insincere, would be awful, and a terrible way to trap someone in a relationship, so I opted for the best friend answer.

My reward was that Sayori committed suicide the next day, though regardless of what the player chooses the outcome is ultimately the same. Doki Doki does an extremely good home of portraying mental illness, and unlike a traditional visual novel, the protagonist's love is not an automatic cure-all for another person's feelings.

To hammer this home, the protagonist has a mental meltdown when he finds Sayori's body, mentioning that this isn't a game where you can just load a save and make another choice.

After the ending, which involves some DOS-like code scrolling on screen, the main menu comes up again, but it's glitched out. Sayori has been replaced by glitchy parts of Monika, Yuri, and Natsuki, and the New Game option is corrupted. This is where the real meat of the game begins.

Also, if you check under Load Game, all previous save files have been erased. (Well done.)

When you start a "New Game" or the option that's in place of New Game, the text is all corrupted and even the music plays a little off. Sayori starts to run up to the protagonist, but she doesn't exist anymore, so her name is glitched out, her portrait is a mix of Yuri and other girls, and then the game behaves like it can't figure out how to proceed. So it reboots itself and the protagonist says he's always walked to school alone.

From there the protagonist is drafted into the club by Monika and the game sort of proceeds as normal except that Sayori doesn't exist, and weird glitches keep happening. For instance, the font changes from time to time, and Monika interrupts the player's attempt to mediate an argument by appearing on top of the UI overlay so it's no longer possible to select a name. The girls' style of speech changes too, and they drop f-bombs when they get really upset.

At one point my protagonist left the classroom to look for Yuri and he found her with a severely slashed up arm, but then the game freaked out and "rewound" itself to the point where he went to go look for her and fast-forwarded to a "good" resolution where Yuri returns with a pot of water to make tea and does not appear to be injured.

Though the first timeline subtly makes it clear that there is possibly something wrong with the girls, the second timeline makes it more blatant, with the font changed text sounding like negative inner thoughts as opposed to the public faces they wear. Monika manages to get creepy through her constant UI breaking and the fact she talks about things like Yuri's habit of cutting herself as though it's nothing more than a personality quirk to be danced around. She discourages the protagonist from spending time with Yuri since she's easily excitable for the wrong reasons. Yuri herself becomes increasingly more obsessed with the protagonist.

Like Sayori, Yuri came to a bad end when I refused her (scarily presented) affection, but interestingly enough the game doesn't end there, and cycles through the weekend of preparation for the festival during which the protagonist has been sitting by her corpse the entirely of the past two days. Natsuki hurls when she comes in and sees the body.

Monika isn't surprised though. Rather, she fixes it by deleting the .chr files related to Yuri and Natsuki, and apologizes for accidentally leaving the protagonist with the dead body over the weekend. She reveals that she's not very good at this hacking sort of thing. (If you look in the character directory of the game's install path, you'll only see Monika, and none of the other characters.)

The game becomes a different sort of creepy when it begins its "third" run through. Monika disposes of the pretense of playing a high school dating sim and addresses the player behind the screen directly. My male protagonist had a male name, but Monika chose to address me as "Laurie," which was interesting. I'm not sure where the game pulled my name from, but I assume it pulls from some sort of Windows file that mentions who the owner of my computer is.

The nutshell of the game within a game is that Monika became self-aware that she was a character in a dating sim, and that she was not a love interest. The protagonist can only gain affection with Sayori, Yuri, and Natsuki (if you look in the poetry composition section, those three are present as chibis, but no Monika). However, being self-aware, Monika wanted more and essentially hacked her own game to force herself to become a love interest and give herself the ending the structure of the game denied her. In fact she wants to be the only love interest in order to keep the attention of the one entity that makes her existence bearable; the player.

She isn't very good at the hacking thing though, which is why things glitched out, and her subtler attempts to manipulate the other girls into being undesirable failed. Yuri in particular backfired drastically when she become so obsessed with the protagonist that Monika couldn't get any time alone with him. (Ironically, when I was playing the game at face value, Monika was the one girl I was actually trying to date, but I could tell the game wasn't letting me.)

The only way to continue the game after Monika has turned the game world into nothing but a classroom where she can gaze into your eyes, is a creative trick where you delete her .chr file, just like she had deleted the .chr files of the other characters. (The .chr files are dummy files that aren't actually character files so much as something the game looks for so it knows how to behave at different parts of the story. You can find multiple Easter eggs by monkeying around with them.)

I quite liked the game, and for a first effort it's amazingly good, though it's not as horror-ish as I thought it would be. The second playthrough when the user interface begins acting strangely and you keep getting weird/scary "bonus" poems, is the most horrifying segment of the game. I played the bulk of Doki Doki in two sessions, and I stopped in the middle because the second playthrough was creeping me out.

But after I found out what was going on, Monika's existential horror at being trapped inside a game didn't scare me. I felt sorry for her, and she's still my favorite character out of the bunch, but the horror portion of the game was effectively gone.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. The game is still very good at playing with expectations and you can tell that Dan Salvato and his team know the visual novel tropes they're messing with. It just makes it harder to define, because I don't think calling this a horror visual novel is entirely fair. I suppose I'd say it's more of a science fiction drama with some very intense moments. Though again, telling someone that is a bit of a spoiler, since the game outwardly presents itself as a harmless romance visual novel.

In any case, I can see why this got so popular, and if for some reason you read this without playing the game, it's worth checking out. It doesn't have to cost you anything.