In a few Discord servers, I've stated, usually in very chide one-off statements, that this game sucks. I've never actually spent time elaborating why it sucks, and I realize that just saying it does doesn't really help any conversation whatsoever, or really have anything new to put forth.

Because, to be honest, to say this game is all bad is missing the mark just as much as saying “anime is for weebs”... which is largely true but still missing some information that could point a different direction..

So what is DDLC? It’s a very, very short VN that lampshades what happens in most VNs, where you meet a handful of characters and deal/handle their personal issues, except without a lot to say about it. It uses its runtime to poke fun at the laughable traits of the worst of VNs while then proceeding to put some valid criticism of unconditional attachment, while peppering its runtime with enough shock value to make streamers freak the fuck out and thus become a touchstone of Twitch culture with its reaction and memes such as “just Monika”. I highly doubt that all of that was intentional, but the impact can’t be disregarded, because it did become a part of online video game culture as a whole… for better or for worse.

There is something I need to outline. While I agree usually that a game should not be based on its toxic fanbase, DDLC is so big that it’s tough to ignore. It is extremely hard to detach the community and fanbase as a whole from the game. We can agree to disagree from there.

Let’s be clear, the shock value fucking works for one key moment. I am a wimp and autistic and find very emotional attachment to video games that is borderline unhealthy, and thus the very infamous first shock rolled me over like a lawnmower and I still have nightmares thinking about it. If there’s one thing to give credit to DDLC, it is that it’s very unpredictable, although at the expense of pacing or having a good kind of shock value past the first moment.

Everything else is very standard and frustrating to go through, particularly a moment where you have to “auto-skip” for a moment that abuses its time to the fullest extent. I don’t care if it’s not supposed to be fun, it’s nauseating. It doesn’t have anything to gain for its inclusion OTHER than shocking the player and to hammer harder how messed up Monika is, which would have benefitted from a tighter pace. Subversion, especially when it’s creatively done like DDLC, is fine, but its pace and execution despite its concept hampers this to an extreme.

DDLC’s good, however, comes in two things: a general and well done understanding of depression and the pain it causes through its first introductory character arc, and the danger and toxicity of parasocial relationships represented via Monika’s rampant fascination with the player. The latter unfortunately…. is not even knee deep. It does not deconstruct how it comes to exist but rather comments on its existence, which is fine but doesn’t leave a lot to take away.

So what anecdotal interactions poison the game for me? It is that it has massively poisoned talking about VNs and the Western reaction to VNs as a whole. The game is definitely pointing at a very particular subgenre of VNs, but its popularity has created a vacuum of using the game as a point to how “all VNs are bad” and how ridiculous the genre is. Yes, people can sometimes be dumb and stupid, as can I, but I’ve seen it happen EVERYWHERE.

I’m not an expert on VNs (in fact I’ve only started recently to delve into the genre with games like Umineko, The Silver Case, and Nekojishi), but it’s insane how much DDLC has colored VN’s image that the games themselves have been not at all what’s expected. I don’t even… know of any game DDLC is really pointing out here. In the end, it feels like it has a blanket “VNs bad” side to its conversation around the medium where the tropes it is subverting in its runtime a mainstay more for anime as a whole rather than VN dating sims instead. Am I missing something? Maybe I need to play more VNs.

Trust me, it’s not that there aren't bad VNs. I can go to fucking TOWN on Nekojishi for its disgusting moments with its true ending and in the end having zero to take away from other than… the tiger guys are adorable.

The biggest struggle comes from where, when I enjoy a VN (or when other big friends of mine do), it’s tough to recommend, because the image that DDLC has created in popular culture casts a big enough web to catch SUVs. There are other barriers to entry such as price and it not being as “video game” as other genres, but this to me has been the biggest barrier now.

My hope is to understand where I come from now when I say “Fuck DDLC”. It’s partly the game but way more because of the culture that surrounds it.

At least it’s free.

This is the Steve Cutts animation of video games. How are there so many youtubers who think this is brilliant and so many normal people who think this sucks.

I really really wish this game had the balls to name specific works of literature. Like this:

“I’m reading, um… 👉👈 well, you’ll think it’s stupid Gare-Kun, but I’m rereading Gravity’s Rainbow. It definitely helps to just let Pynchon’s wild prose wash over you first before you can really get into his subtle wordplay and encyclopedic references… I didn’t mean to brag, though! I’m sorry if it came off that way…”

“Ugh, can’t you see I’m reading Hegel?! I think he has very interesting things to say about a priori knowledge versus the supposed empiricism of the senses. Not that I’d expect you to care, baka 🙄”

sitting at the top of a hill littered with 2010s western independent charmers with hamfisted attempts at satire, post-modernism, genre critique, societal reflection and subversive storytelling is this crown jewel; the crème de la crème example of the self-serving haughty pretentiousness of an entire generation of would-be internet geniuses scrolling through tv tropes page by page in hopes to form contrarian opinions on popular media based on the talking points and consensuses of other people. if you're of a certain age demographic, you know this person - the one who parrots the opinions of your nostalgic critics and mr. enters as if the information they siphoned by lazing about youtube in search of a personality might be enough to make someone go, 'geez, this guy KNOWS his stuff' without having to go through the effort of formulating their own thoughts, or even worse, having to experience the media they're responding to the response of firsthand.

doki doki literature club stands as an indulgence of saturated moe-era anime tropes under the guise of a critique of the wikipedia plot summaries of KEY, ryukishi07 and type-moon games without having the slightest bit of humility or self-awareness in its execution. it, its creator, and its audience herald itself as some massive deconstruction of the visual novel form, when in actuality it's about in line with the actuality of what it's criticizing as yiik is with jrpgs. there is no metatextual subversion to be had. doki doki is a children's birthday magician - a couple of flashy tricks capable of fooling someone who doesn't know how ren'py works, but beyond its cheap parlor tricks which might give the astute horror mastery of, say, happy tree friends a run for its money, the title lacks substance, it lacks any form of personality, and it lacks the competence to warrant these mistakes in the face of a greater picture or experience.

i won't even dip into the implications the creator has made about how this game is apparently a very real and serious approach to topics such as self-harm and abuse - as a survivor of both i find these claims bordering on insanity - but i will offer the benefit of a doubt and suggest that maybe this is a product of genuine, ineffable incompetence and misjudgment... rather than one of deep-rooted pretention and narcissism. you could get the exact same experience intersplicing five nights at freddy's jumpscare reaction videos, one of the upteenth saw sequels, and nyan neko sugar girls as one would have playing doki doki literature club, but at the least, the former is shocking, entertaining and funny when it intends to be. do your wallet a favor and pass on this one - and yes, i know it's free.

This is the most opprobious game of the year. Desperate for attention, this visual novel lives and dies by a single evident gimmick, which is to shock the player with anime girls and a dating sim facade to reveal later a profane horror game, like a creepypasta. This shallow premise's effectiveness is destroyed by the game's own writing, since the script attempts to subvert harem anime clichés by adding more anime stereotypes, most prominently the yandere trope and an incessant amount of androcentrism by portraying girls unable to contain their attraction to a guy - this is handled as insultingly as it sounds, since the villain is a girl who mauls her rivals in order to be alone with you forever and be on an eternal date. In addition to that, Doki Doki Literature Club adds fourth-wall breaking such as glitching out the game, messing with the files, expecting the player to clear the game multiple times for the good ending and adding "creepy images and text files" to your disk drive as its pretense to horror, but on an age where meta narrative is a trend among trashy self-referential indie hits (Undertale, Pony Island, Luna Game), the game keeps falling on trends and becoming predictable, turning the experience into merely seeing what is going to be the next trick on the checklist now that the true face of the game is unveiled. How is a game that attempts to surprise going to even achieve this purpose if its own writing and design is completely counterproductive? Bonus points for throwing a warning of disturbing content at the start, defeating the whole purpose of the game.

The game's apologists might argue that it's a parody, but the game's endings suggest that the story is supposed to be taken seriously. Some might argue that it's a portrayal of depression, but its horror elements end up making the issue more insensitive towards it under this perspective. At the end of the day, Doki Doki Literature Club is a game about nothing and without a single original idea. Even peruvian horror B movies have more dignity than this crappypasta.

A loveletter to VNs, except that the writer clearly hates VNs so in that regard DDLC is only one step above shitty ironic VNs that get regurgitated out for short-term cashgrabs. This is exacerbated by how much the game reinforces generic dating sim tropes, instead of acknowledging the strengths of the VN genre/medium. The one silver lining is that the game is genuinely scary/atmospheric at parts (I'm weak to glitch horror so it doesn't have to be particularly good to scare me though).

EDIT: After reading the links posted in the comments of this review, I no longer think that Dan Salvato secretly hates VNs or anything like that, but I still feel as though DDLC fails to be an effective loveletter to VNs just because of how heavily it reinforces generic dating sim tropes.

EDIT EDIT: Ignore the previous edit. This game is disrespectful to VNs and survivors of suicide-related trauma and Dan Salvato is a hack.

i know im years late to this conversation but uh, whats scary about this game?

this game markets itself as psychological horror but literally nothing that happens in it is remotely scary in any sense. Like what, some eyeballs move? A jpeg of some anime girl hanging there? Shittily animated amime girl stabbing herself? Anime girl delete files and talks to me? Beyond any other complaints I could have about this game, it just doesnt work as a horror game whatsoever because the game needs to tell me at the beginning that it is one.

Bonus points for some interesting technical stuff under the hood tho, and having specific "scares" happen depending on if youre recording or not is pretty genius.

I'm not spoiler tagging this because this game doesn't deserve it. Let's just start off by saying that this game's content warning at the beginning is severely insufficient. A character in this game commits suicide, and does so in such a context that the game seemingly wants you to blame yourself for this. Shortly after this is when I stopped playing, when other characters started mentioning things like self-harm and abuse. I tried looking up if the game ever does anything to earn this subject matter and it does not, it uses it solely for shock value. I hate that this game became a Let's Play sensation because for those going in blind, the disgusting way in which it handles its subject matter can be actively harmful depending on your mental state.

Eh? I don't think the ideas this tackles are interesting or even really well explored (gaming as an art form really needs to move beyond the idea of interrogating the player's role in a game's story, what that means for agency for the player and characters, etc. Metal Gear Solid 2 already explored those ideas sufficiently while also tying those ideas to the emotional intentions of the narrative, which this fails to do). This is mostly a self-congratulatory critique of the medium that feels like it's pushing toward something bigger but never truly delivers (almost like how I feel about og Ghost in the Shell, now that I think about it). Feel like this follows in the same vein of modern horror movies whose director's create them because they want to make more "mature" genre fare when a lot of earlier works are far more interesting and mature than their creations. And this is coming from someone who's only played a bit of Higurashi and Tsukuhime but those are clearly superior works in terms of conveying the horror and off-kilter emotions attempted here.

It's attempting to deliver on the same dreamlike, in-between state of being that, say, the ending of Mulholland Drive delivers. And this is not to say that it really even compares to that, but its intentions are similar and the little mechanical/visual tricks it pulls to sell that narrative descent are genuinely neat, if surface level. But perhaps I'm just easily amused by those sorts of things, I love amorphous narrative modes; starting as one thing and then becoming another, which is something that I think should be explored mechanically more in games. Why not have a visual novel abruptly turn into a first-person adventure game in the middle to sell a certain emotion? But that's a difficult shift to achieve and would require someone of far more interesting thematic and mechanical sensibilities to be making games. Doki Doki Literature Club is child's play compared to whatever that would result in.

So, here's the thing. Monika is a fantastic antagonist. She is genuinely terrific, and this goes much deeper than her initial 'anime girl but creepy' persona when you reach the final act. At the end of the game, you're locked in a room with Monika at the end of the world. By this point, it seems like Monika is little more than a psychopathic yandere menace that needs to be taken down, an obvious threat that you want nothing to do with. You'd reasonably assume that given this point in the game - trapped in a room with a lovey-dovey serial for all eternity unless you do something about it - you'd think that game would start diving into the depths of Monika's fucked-up personality and really start etching out as much uncomfortable creepiness from her soul as it possibly can, given the game's attitude and approach to creepypasta antics. You reasonably think to yourself: this is the moment where the curtain falls and we see her for the monster she is.

What actually happens is quite a bit different. Monika just starts talking to you about... stuff. Surprisingly normal stuff. Music, spicy food, vegetarianism, anxiety, technology, making friends. And this isn't just flavor text - she has a lot to say about these topics, and she doesn't hold a crazy-person perspective on any of these things. In fact, a lot of what she says is very introspective, heartwarming, and even funny sometimes.

And then it hits you that the game has pulled its' greatest trick right at the end. After hours of creepypasta horror antics and building Monika up to be this sinister, ominous force that both desperately wants you yet dominates everything around you, when the story is poised to finally take a deep dive into the darkness of her soul... Monika, and the game around her, drops its' silly pretenses of being a horror game and instead looks inward, allowing Monika to just sit down and engage the player one-on-one because she knows that's the only chance she'll ever get. And there's a lot of really interesting subtext going on under the hood here. Monika isn't just aware that she's in a video game, she's trapped in the metaphysical constraints of that game. Now, her fascination with the player transcends her feelings of lovesick obsession with you - she wants you because you are everything she wants, and what she wants is freedom. Monika feels chastened and existentially mortified by her role in the game, and then you come along, this independent and unique figure to her world, and she just has to have you. It's not even necessarily because of you. It's because of what you represent. Freedom. Not only does this open up an incredibly interesting and potent can of worms on existentialism, agency, and parasocial relationships...

...But it also makes it that much harder to pull the trigger on Monika when the time comes. In a single, fantastic ending scene, Monika goes from being the obvious bad guy to the girl everyone wanted to save the most. Monika's explosive popularity was more than just her cute looks and her twist villain antics - she was shockingly easy to like at the end of the day, and there's a genuine sadness and tragedy that underscores her actions. She turns to murder not just out of spite and jealousy, but out of desperation. Desperation to feel an actual human touch instead of the cold, sterile nothingness of coding and circuitry. She killed her friends just to get a moment alone with you because the game simply wouldn't have allowed it otherwise, and there's something genuinely devastating and sad about that.

(Also, uh, Sayori's depression is handled in a surprisingly profound and harrowingly nuanced way. Her depression feels tangible and believable enough that her hanging comes not as an unpleasant surprise, but as the unfortunately logical end to not only her arc, but to DDLC's psychological-horror tone as a whole.)

Sayori and Monika work really, really well. They are genuinely well-written, likable, and there's a lot of depth packed into their characters that it makes it easy to care about them when the game gets dark. So why is this game only a 3/5?

Well, frankly, because the rest of it is just not fucking interesting, man. Those interesting and juicy themes about character archetypes and agency and feeling trapped by the confines of a seemingly-idyllic world only pop up at the end, and the depression stuff is only really tackled at the end of the first act. The rest of the game is either mindless fluff that winds up playing with the same VN tropes the game seems to be mocking, or fucking around with lame creepypasta bullshit like bleeding eyes and photorealism and jumpscares that wind up completely undermining the genuine psychological horror found in Monika's existentialism and Sayori's realistic depression.

The creepypasta shit is particularly damning - when DDLC indulges in this, it turns into a game with nothing to say, a game full of cheap 'gotcha' moments meant to be reacted to by streamers and Let's Players in funny and amusing ways. Because of the second act of the game choosing to hone in on the cheap horror tricks instead of genuinely developing the cast further outside of Monika, Yuri and Natsuki wind up feeling more uninteresting and shallow compared to Sayori and Monika's more fleshed-out characterization. Yuri in particular really suffers from this - at least Natsuki has some humanizing moments, but Yuri getting creepier and creepier as a result of Monika's machinations wind up not only robbing Yuri of her agency (in a way the game did not intend), but undermining whatever investment I had in her by turning her into the game's vessel for jumpscares.

There's a few moments of characterization I genuinely liked on their own (one of the best moments in the game is Natsuki handing you what you think is gonna be another poem, but it's actually a secret letter saying that's she's genuinely worried about Yuri), and there's some impressive coding and programming stuff going on under the hood of this thing, similar to Undertale. But I honestly can't fuck with DDLC outside of the Sayori-Monika stuff because I think it often strays too far from its themes and what makes it really click. In the moments where DDLC is either 'scary' or just trying to set up buildup to the scary shit in the hopes of catching you off-balance, it ceases to have anything to say, and that's a damn shame, because what it does have to say (when it bothers to) is compelling and devastating.

Very interesting experiment, though, and Monika alone narrowly bumps this up to a 3. I think if this wasn't free-to-play, I'd have a lot more issues with this game.