(It apparently isn’t possible to reload a save from before Sayori’s suicide, although I never tried this.) I didn’t yet know what was going on. As soon as I saw the protagonist say that “this isn’t some game where I can reset,” I guessed correctly that this was a trick. I know that it didn’t, because Doki Doki Literature Club tipped its hand. I don’t know if this could’ve worked for me. From top to bottom: Yuri, Natsuki, Sayori, and Monika. The game “ends,” and leads you to a title screen where Sayori’s image is defaced with a glitch.Ī bookmark from the Doki Doki Literature Club official store. It appears for all the world that whatever you chose to do - spend time with Sayori or one of her friends, admit romantic or platonic feelings for Sayori - was the proximate cause for her suicide. When the protagonist finds her body, the game glitches out, as the protagonist agonizes over his - your - decisions that led up to this point. Either her relationship with or her romantic rejection by the protagonist is too much to handle, and she hangs herself in her bedroom. Sayori is indeed depressed, and her difficulty coping with this new dynamic between her and the protagonist slowly takes over the story. I sussed these tendencies pretty early on - the hints aren’t exactly subtle - and, since I knew this wasn’t a conventional dating sim, I expected them to take over the game. Natsuki has a troubled relationship with her father. The romance is conventional, but there are quiet hints that there are problems underneath the surface: Sayori alludes to nagging depression. You pursue each girl romantically by choosing words that match their interests in a poem-writing minigame. Each day, the girls share poems that slowly reveal parts of their personality and backstory, while the player-controlled protagonist chooses which girl to pursue romantically in a word-choice minigame. Sayori, your cheery childhood friend, introduces you to the titular afterschool literature club, composed of her, introvert Yuri, outspoken and prickly Natsuki, and confident and popular club president Monika. Suffice it to say, I am not a fan.ĭoki Doki starts off cheery and conventional. The second, more important, warning: Doki Doki Literature Club is a horror game that uses graphic suicide for lurid shock content. This isn’t simply some “Darth Vader is Luke’s father” dramatic reveal, either: Doki Doki Literature Club is a metatextual mystery game, where much of the mystery is figuring out what sort of game it actually is. Instead, it has a twist that turns the benign premise on its head. It’s impossible to talk about this game on anything but the most superficial level without giving away the fact that it is not a harmless dating simulator. The first, and least important, is a spoiler warning. I managed to get from 2017 to when I played it without being spoiled, except in that I knew that there was something to be spoiled.Īny frank discussion of Doki Doki needs two warnings. It is not as conventional as it seems, however, and to discuss how and why is to spoil it. The personality-free faceless protagonist pursues one of the four romantically-available girls in the club. Doki Doki Literature Club appears to be a conventional renai game, a vaguely-Japanese high school’s after-school reading club.
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