not really scary at all. portrait manipulation jumpscare stuff is laughable, characters are pretty bland and one note, which i suppose is the point, until the game starts to "delete" them and expects a reaction out of you, meta file stuff is kind of cool in concept but serves no real other purpose than to go "ooh look at me i'm SENTIENT video game." has little to no depth and overall just really predictable and bland. tries way too hard to get a kick out of you but falls flat on it's face and becomes a mockery of itself.

imo DDLC does a pretty tasteless interpretation of depression and suicide. It relies on creepy-pasta tier shock value to get across its themes, and doesn't provide any nuanced exploration as a result. It falls into the trap of being just edgy enough to seem interesting, but not enough to make any meaningful statements. I get that the characters are intentionally one dimensional, but then they are given a complex problem like mental illness to deal with, it just doesn't feel real. I could never get invested in the characters, which made the big moments kinda lose their impact.

It's aight, but there's VNs that do what this set out to do but better. Doesn't really help the devs don't know shit about VNs, as well as clearly dislike them, and are basing their criticisms based on surface level knowledge about them. It tries to act all high and mighty about "anime and VNs bad!!!!!!11!!!", but really, it's about as deep as a puddle. I always say that the best deconstructions of something come from people who actually love what they're making fun of. And this is a good example of why I think that.

Edit: I don't think the dev necessarily hates either anime or VNs after reading up on it and discussing it in the comments, but I feel a lot of my points still stand. It misconstrues a lot of VNs by implying most of them are just these shallow dating sims.

THIS IS THE STORY OF A DAY WHERE THERE WAS ALL THIS BLOOD. A MAN WAS WALKING AROUND AND BLOOD STARTED COMING OUT OF HIM EVERYWHERE. THERE WAS SO MUCH BLOOD THAT IT FILLED UP AN ELEVATOR. HE WENT TO THE STORE AND THERE WAS JUST BLOOD ALL OVER THE PLACE! PEOPLE WERE SLIPPING IN IT AND THEY WERE ALL GROSSED OUT. HE TRIED TO GO SWIMMING AND ALL OF THE SHARKS WENT NUTS AND BITTENED EVERYBODY. HE GOT CHASED BY ALL THE VAMPIRES EVER. ONE TIME THE BLOOD GOT A KID AND A DOG. AT THE END OF THE DAY EVERYONE DECIDED THEY WOULD SEND HIM TO SPACE SO THAT HE WOULD STOP GETTING BLOOD EVERY WHERE. THE SCARIEST PART IS THAT THE MAN WAS YOU!!! (OR HE WAS A LADY IF YOU ARE A LADY) AND YOU FORGOT THAT THIS HAPPENED.

I think what stings about this the most is that it could easily be turned into something I adore. Anime isn't much my thing besides a select few series such as The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (which does everything this game does but actually has a point), and video games as a whole often squander their potential to be truly astounding creations to interact with. Merging these two under the guise of postmodern deconstruction is tricky but not impossible. I think this is achieved in the most routine way possible but is severely lacking in thought and purpose. It's not often that interacting with something and NOT interacting with something yields the exact same results. I don't much mind the gameplay being little more than a visual novel and I even love the idea of interacting with the game in multiple ways to achieve the "good ending", but the actual message at the end ruins my ability to suspend disbelief any further. Salvato states that he enjoys games that do something different and challenge the status quo, even if they are imperfect. While not inherently mean-spirited, I find this approach to creating anything to be entirely misguided.

This game is undeniably different. Minimizing the window and viewing the folder I downloaded of the game's contents and seeing how it changes throughout was very interesting. The constant fourth-wall breaking, character asides, and cleverly subversive use of repetition through dialogue and save states is also novel. These aspects end up being incredibly hollow by the end of the game. Nothing was done in service of characters, emotions, or themes beyond itself. This video game acknowledges it is a video game. Then what? It becomes a surface level examination of itself, serving itself and only itself. Some of the stuff with Sayori and Monika towards the end made me think that there was some form of empathy and depth provided to further connect with these characters, but they end up being little more than strands of code which is EXACTLY what the game wants to be. Madoka Magica posting painted over everything The Witness stands for. I think that this has the makings of actual art, but since people are just now starting to realize that games can and SHOULD be artistically realized, this should serve as an influence for people to create much more meaningful and thoughtful works in a similar vein as this.

You have reminded me that I cannot interact with the game in any meaningful way. The game is different from just about everything I've ever played. You have successfully made suicide, loud and dark digital distortion, and self harm upsetting. Congratulations. Now what?

My most fond memory of this game is one of my friends in high school coming to my house and saying something along the lines of "BROOOOOOOO I've heard of this new CRAZY game where some CRAZY stuff happens" and I was like sure man. So I took my laptop to his house after installing this on Steam and we played through it for a bit getting pretty bored because nothing was happening. After a bit of mashing through dialogue his brother came into the room and said "What the fuck is this gay shit you're playing <f-slur>" and then promptly left. We stopped reading after that. I treasure this memory dearly.

Onto the actual game I only went back and read this now because it would be the 69th VN I've read and I thought that'd be funny. The VN itself like kinda sucks hard though, the characters are nothing and the dialogue is mind numbingly boring, if this was any longer than 4 hours(?) it'd probably be a 1/10. The entire game really just feels like waiting for the <crazy parts> to happen and even when the <crazy parts> do start to happen it's still not all that interesting as you're really just reading the same (mostly unskippable) dialogue and occasionally one of the characters says some shit like "I FUCK DOGS" in creepypasta text with some weird glitch stuff happening. Aside from some exceptions the <crazy parts> also just feel like cheap creepypasta scares too. It was pretty funny when all the characters starting saying fuck tho I chuckled. Overall not good.

Tldr read You and Me and Her, it's like this but it has fun with the concept and uses it in a way that doesn't feel like cheap horror. It also has dialogue that's actually good alongside very fun characters (I love Aoi).