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Doki Doki Literature Club is more than it first seems.
Doki Doki Literature Club introduces itself as a sugary-sweet high school scenario. You’re cajoled into joining a literature club populated by four girls, and begin to get to know them. The visual novel trappings mean it’s conversation-heavy, but you’ll start to make choices about who you hang out with and play poetry minigames where your word choices affect how the girls react to you. Then it starts to show its teeth.
An entirely spoiler-free playthrough is best if you want to feel the full impact of Doki Doki. But that approach is difficult to recommend, because so many of the tricks after this initial segment revolve around difficult and upsetting subjects. As such, a spoiler-free playthrough is the privilege of players who have never needed or benefitted from a content warning.
My own feeling is that Doki Doki collects a lot of metagaming techniques I’ve seen in isolation elsewhere, particularly in my forays into smaller horror games like IMSCARED, and layers them up to create a peculiar onion of a game. It’s a horror onion in dating sim clothing.
Some of the trickery feels cheap or crass—particularly the reliance on various kinds of abuse and mental illness for its twists in the earlier segments. Whether you feel those are justified by the end will vary. For me, I see that those beats are repositioned as you get further into the experience, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t sometimes repellent to encounter. It’s reasonable a player would want to tap out of the game at those points and judge it accordingly.
I initially stopped playing because anime-style dating sims aren’t my thing. Poetry creation was an interesting touch, though. Then I went back having been told there was more to it, only to nearly stop again when ‘more to it’ seemed to mean one of those fads where people endure ‘edgy’ experiences to keep up with their friends.
Ultimately it settled into a curious experience which delights in wrong-footing players. It becomes easier to relish its strengths the further you get, not least because at that point the elements deserving a warning have been recontextualized. I’m still not entirely satisfied by that context but my objections have become very different!
Trying patience
It’s never fully enjoyable because the developer often leans on testing your patience to get to the reveals, but there are moments of delight in the late game, especially when you realize the results of that metatinkering. Among the mass of machinations and shock are pockets of unexpectedly subtle writing.
Doki Doki will definitely appeal to those seeking the next endurance or shock value fad. It isn’t just those things, but its extra layers are gated by material well worth content warnings. The full experience is interesting, but also reserved for players able to shrug off its forays into extreme content.
It becomes easier to relish its strengths the further you get