Doki Doki Literature Club

Doki Doki Literature Club is a Psychological Horror Dating Sim developed by Team Salvato and released on September 22, 2017 for Windows, Mac and Linux. It debuted on the Steam Marketplace on Oct 6.

Team Salvato is a an interesting bunch. They are an indie studio comprised of Dan Salvato, Satchley and Velinquent. Dan handled coding, music and writing for the project while Satchley created the character art and Velinquent provided background art.

Premise

Doki Doki Literature club is about, well, a Literature Club. You, the main character, is introduced to this newly created club. The members include Natsuki, the short, cutsey Tsundere, Yuri, the bookish shrinking violet and Monika, the popular class idol and club president. You reluctantly joined the club, but you decide that perhaps you should give it a fair shot and enjoy the time with your clubmates. Maybe you can make some new friends. You engage in fairly standard dating sim antics and Doki Doki does offer a charming little minigame where you pick words that the main character uses to create the poems he shares with the group. It’s a chance for you to tailor the diction and writing style of your poem to a particular girl of your interest.

Real scary, right? No, you didn’t read the steam tags wrong. Despite its aesthetics, Doki Doki Lit Club is indeed a psychological horror game – so do heed the content warnings. And knowing that up front doesn’t ruin anything for the player because prior knowledge doesn’t make it any less unnerving. In fact, a degree of skepticism and the paranoia it brings actually enhances the experience some. You’ll either get some degree of satisfaction in knowing something was off or it’ll hit you much harder that the game managed to slip so much right by you. It doesn’t help that the game devotes itself to its “facade” much more than one may expect. Sadly, even once the facade is “broken”, you see that said facade was much more honest and earnest than you may want to give it credit for.

Rewritting the Rules…

Doki Doki Literature Club is the bittersweet Dating Sim Decon-Recon switch that we need.

DDLC is a deconstruction of the Dating Sim- not as a genre, but as a medium. Or, perhaps, a better way to put it is that Doki Doki Lit Club is what happens when the implications of the genre meet with the limitations of the medium. Its this collision that acts as the impetus for the game’s more horrific elements. The genre offers a sense of freedom and opportunity that this particular (or, if we’re honest, any) iteration in the medium just can’t offer and whatever entity is causing trouble has come to collect – at any cost.

The reconstruction bit comes about once the games has taken its more unnerving aspects to their logical extremes. At this point, the same methodologies and ideologies that were used to terrorize the player and characters prove vital in helping to resolve the catastrophe. And, even in such a bleak context, there are still lessons to be learned, growth to be had and some degree of happiness to be found if one devotes themselves to it.

Despite its weirdness, Doki Doki Lit Club is still a Dating Sim at heart. As such, love is a central theme – for better or for worse. There are some truly wholesome depictions in Doki Doki, but there’s also some rather….malformed ones as well. If there was any one takeaway from this game, it would be that love is a combination of feelings and actions. There’s no accounting for feelings, but if the way you express those feelings are detrimental to those around you then that’s a poor form of love – if that can even be considered a form of love at all. The bitter truth is that sometimes, the most loving thing you can do for a person will be woefully unsatisfying for you.

Writing your Way Into A Heart…

Doki Doki Lit Club isn’t a game that you play. It’s a game that plays itself – largely at your expense. It has a self-awareness about it that gives it a certain life of its own. Doki Doki transitions from happy and charming to confusing and unnerving to solemn and bittersweet.

It’s a game that knows what it is – good and bad. It comes to its own conclusions and makes its own decisions. It’ll just be sure to grab you by the hand and drag you along for the ride. And once it’s done and you’re left frazzled, that self-actualization will have brought about a bittersweet finality you wouldn’t have expected.