This blog contains spoilers both about Doki Doki Literature Club. Do not read if you still intend to experience it for yourself first-hand and do not read if you are sensitive to topics involving mental health conditions.
This game has been picking up momentum online recently. Upon realising that the game is free, and after being nudged towards trying it by oddly tight-lipped friends, I downloaded it from Steam. I did notice whilst on the Steam page that it was tagged Psychological Horror, which initially told me a little about what I was going to be getting into, and upon booting up the game, there is a disclaimer that this game is not suitable for children or people uncomfortable with topics of anxiety and depression. Given its disguise as a visual novel it's very easy to assume that these warnings relate to issues that you will be helping the characters in coping with as is quite typical in VNs, or a bad end, another common trope in the genre.
For a little exposition if you're for some reason reading this without knowing what DDLC is, it is a psychological horror metagame disguised as a visual novel. For the majority of the first playthrough, it's a high-spirited interactive romance story, where upon naming your character, you are coaxed into joining a struggling high-school Literature Club with your childhood friend Sayori. Sayori is a somewhat hyperactive, cheery girl who has a strong sense of familiarity with the character you're playing, and holds some very badly hidden romantic feelings for you. After agreeing to join the club, you spend your time interacting with Sayori and 3 other girls. Yuri, a tall, shy bookworm who loves horror fiction, Natsuki, a tsundere under-classman who enjoys baking and prefers manga to prose, and Monika, the friendly club president who is both academically and athletically talented and is popular around the school for both her likeable personality and her looks.
Monika sets a task to go home and write a poem, to share with the rest of the club, which gives you a mini-game involving choosing 20 words from a list of options, and those words choose who you will spend your time getting to know during club time out of Sayori, Yuri and Natsuki depending on who your poem is most suited to. In my playthrough, I hung out with Yuri as I found her character to be the most interesting. After several days pass, you get to know each character a little better, Yuri for example, has very low self-esteem, and feels very shocked that you enjoy spending time with her. In response to how understanding and patient she views you as being due to listening to her talk, she also develops romantic feelings for the protagonist.
One day, Sayori seems uncharacteristically quiet and after probing what's wrong, she decides to go home early. Nevertheless, the school festival is looming in classic stereotypical anime fashion and the club is preparing for a poetry performance in the club room. You are given a choice of who to invite to your house over the weekend to help with preperations for the event, you can help Natsuki bake cupcakes or you can help Yuri with banners and other decorations.
Upon visiting Sayori, you continue to probe into the reason behind her mood recently and find that she is in fact heavily, deeply depressed. Her hyperactive cheery attitude is a cover to prevent her real, sensitive emotions burdening others. This is a topic that hit me strongly, as like a large chunk of humanity, without getting into it too heavily here, have dealt with depression for a long time. It's revealed that Sayori is constantly late to school in the mornings due to her difficulty to get out of bed, and she hints that she feels terribly guilty for having feelings for the protagonist, and sees these feelings of jealousy over seeing you getting closer to other girls as punishment for feeling this way about somebody she feels that she doesn't deserve.
After assuring Sayori that you will always be there for her as a friend, and that you will from now on help her in dealing with her depression, it's time for either Natsuki or Yuri to arrive at your house to prepare for the festival. Despite assuring Sayori that she should come too and spend time taking her mind off of her negative thoughts, she declines. I got the Yuri route, so I spent the Sunday creating decorations with her. In Yuri's scenes, you discover that she has quite a creepy hobby in collecting ornamental knives, but to each their own. After Yuri is leaving that day, Sayori comes to speak to you, it's here that she confesses her love for the protagonist and you can choose to either accept her feelings, or tell her that you wish to remain friends. I rejected her, telling her that she'll always be my best friend, and Sayori broke down into tears, and then left.
The following morning, Sayori is late for school as usual, and you now know why. Sayori doesn't come to school at all that day. Once you get to the club, you check out the club pamphlet that's to be handed out at the festival with each poem the members have submitted to read aloud. However, instead of the poem you thought Sayori had submitted, her poem is this. Alarmed and worried, you run to Sayori's house to be there for her, but she doesn't answer the doorbell, you knock on her bedroom door, but she doesn't reply. You brace yourself to enter her bedroom to pull her out of hiding, but Sayori is dead. Sayori has hung herself, which the game shows you in no small detail. The game ends abruptly.
Except the game isn't over, you're filled in on the backstory, the prologue is over and now you're ready to play the real Doki Doki Literature Club. You are brought to the title screen once more, to find that Sayori's picture has been corrupted and covered. Trying to load your previous save files shows an error message. Selecting New Game starts the Visual Novel from the beginning, with a major difference, Sayori does not exist. Instead of Sayori coaxing you into joining the literature club, you're approached by Monika and convinced to be the 4th member so that the club has enough people to stay official.
This time around, things are quite strange. Characters are more on edge, and many characteristics they showed hints of in the previous playthrough are exaggerated and blown out of proportion. Yuri for example this time, upon being shown attention, starts to obsess over spending time with you to the point of starting arguments with the others if they interrupt. You see hints that she has been cutting herself, and Monika pulls you aside to suggest that it may even be a sexual thing for her. At one point, Yuri reveals that she stole your pen from you, and has been treasuring it ever since. The game at this point has been showing heavy signs of corruption, third party interference and hauntingly bizarre messages. Things come to a head when, alone in the classroom on the Friday, Yuri confesses her love to you. No matter which choice you pick, Yuri smiles, pulls out a knife and stabs herself in the heart. Instead of ending the game again like after the previous suicide, Yuri's textbox continues to talk corrupted, illegible text despite the game being excrutiatingly clear that Yuri is dead. The text continues to scroll for a long time, a really long time, pushing you to use the fast-forward feature, where you're shown to be stuck with Yuri's corrupted text script as evening dawns, then night, then morning. To be exact, you're stuck there all weekend until Monika finds you the following Monday.
It is here that you find out the truth. Doki Doki Literature Club was once a normal, happy visual novel, however Monika, is self-aware about her nature as a character in a fictional video game. She was not given a romance option for the player to spend time with her in this game. Aware that all her "friends" are lines of code, aware that her life is nothing but a lie and aware that despite being the only thing self-aware, she is not given a happy ending drives her insane. It's at this point she reveals that she has been tampering with the game, rewriting the other girls to increasingly severe heights in hopes that you would not like them and see her instead, and upon failing that, deleted Sayori altogether, she then deletes the rest of the game, leaving you, Monika and the empty clubroom floating in a void of non-existence.
The rest of the game from here is an endless conversation with Monika. She refers to you by your real name (read from Windows profile on your computer, or whatever equivalent Mac does), and not whatever you chose to name the protagonist, because she is in fact in love with you, the player. Aware that there is a real world out there, and that you are her only window into that world of actual existance, she has fallen for you, commenting that she doesn't even know if you're actually a boy or a girl, and that that's not important. She will even know if you are streaming on Twitch or other websites, by commenting "You've brought a crowd of people with you", she'll not call you by your real name if she detects you streaming, in case you wish to keep your real name secret.
One of the topics she talks about was how she deleted the other girls, mentioning (for me due to playing on Steam) that she had to right click on the game in the Steam library to go to the game's folders on my hard drive, to a folder containing each characters data, and deleted Sayori.chr, Yuri.chr and Natsuki.chr, commenting that she hopes you'll cherish Monika.chr because that's where her existence is. This is how you complete the game, you go into your hard drive and delete Monika.chr. It's also at this point it dawned on me why when barging into Sayori's house her parents weren't around, they didn't have .chr files therefore weren't programmed into the game.
Despite the horrible things she had done, I didn't find myself hating Monika. Despite all the destruction she caused that led to the other characters spiralling insanity and suicide, she still felt like a victim of the game. Trapped in her solitude as other "not real" characters spent time with the only person she had ever met that actually, truly existed. Monika isn't actually self-aware, just like the rest of the game's characters, but in the context of the story I found her to be a very tragic character. I deleted her not because I hated her, I did it because it was how you finish the game. That gave me more of a sense of horror than anything else up to that point. I did what she did to the others because I wanted to proceed in the game. When she initially realised what I had done, by physically deleting Monika.chr from the game's folders in my hard drive, she told me that I make her sick, that I would kill her after everything that she had done for me. This doesn't last long, and she becomes lucid once more, understanding what she has done and why the player would choose to delete her in the end, but I still felt sorry about deleting her.
I've purposely not mentioned some very interesting moments of the game, partly in hope that if you haven't played this game for yourself yet, you will, but also because this is long enough as it is with 90% of the blog being a synopsis of what happens and 10% being my thoughts on the experience. There are many interactive and meta things with this game outside of itself, such as Monika leaving notes in the game folders that appear and disappear when she is making modifications to the game. Hidden poems that offer a deep insight in to her experiences and other very very creepy goings on.
There's also the side that the game leaves ambiguous over how much of the things affecting the characters was Monika's doing. For example, in the first playthrough, we find that Yuri has a collection of ornate knives that she enjoys looking at, and we see that post-corruption Yuri obsessively self-mutilates herself, but Yuri always wears long sleeved clothing, even when you meet her in normal clothes. Is this because Yuri actually did cut herself and it was escalated by Monika's interference, or was it entirely a ploy to put distance between you and her from Monika? People are not 1 dimensional, and despite Doki Doki Literature Club trying to give you the illusion that it's characters are, they're not either.
DDLC subverts a lot of your expectations, whether you're aware of where it's going or not. This game is scary not because of jump scares or standard horror themes, it lulls you into a false sense of security for the first few hours until you are comfortable with the visual novel and are emotionally invested in it's characters. The game is scary because there are horror elements where you know there shouldn't be. All throughout the 2nd act you know that things shouldn't be this way, and are powerless as a player to change them, you're simply along for the ride. Visual novels are all about their heartwarming stories, full of cute and pretty CGs, where you get to know interesting and enthralling characters and want everything to work out for them. That doesn't happen here, there is no happy ending for it's characters (though there is a hidden ending, but it's hardly happy), you won't see things work out for these people you've been building connections with for the past few hours, and that is why Doki Doki Literature Club is truly scary. Powerlessness, subversion of expectations and confusion.
I don't think being spoiled about this game would ruin the experience, but I'm glad I didn't know anything apart from the game's Steam tags when going into it. There's a lot about this game that I still can't find the words to describe, and I haven't done it justice in defining it. This game really spoke to me as a creator. Although I'm not a horror writer and don't really see myself writing anything scary, the essence of DDLC's constant surprising quality and the fact that every moment of playing it from the 2 hour mark onwards my jaw was on the floor are things I would hope to recreate if ever publishing work of my own.
