This review contains spoilers
The way we interact with narrative is part of a narrative. It's why so many reviews go into their experiences with a game. I will always love Final Fantasy VI because of it being hugely formative to my understanding of storytelling. Video games have a special method of tapping into this interactivity. They directly speak to the player and make them feel empowered in a narrative unlike any other medium with the amount of direct control you exert over them.
Undertale manages this flawlessly. The metatext intersects with the text in a beautiful way, the game recontextualizing the nature of video games themselves. When Flowey tells you that to 100% a game is to exhaust it of its meaning, of it being a world you could inhabit (not in those exact words, mind you, that would be a little too blunt for my liking) and draw upon his experiences a player-like entity, it made me think about the way I played video games. The way I interacted with the art form on the whole. Had I been making games worse for myself by 100%ing them? Had I been stripping them of their meaning by hollowing them out?
Doki Doki Literature Club! doesn't bother with messaging. Doki Doki Literature Club! consists of a game that interacts with metatext but only in its aesthetics, it uses it to say nothing and do nothing. When you reach the big twist of the game about halfway through, that it was actually self-aware akin to a creepypasta game, the game doesn't ever move on from that. It wears the guise of making commentary on visual novels, but never says anything specific. What am I supposed to take away from this experience?
What even is Doki Doki Literature Club! about? Who is it about? It's often cited as a satire of visual novels, but satire has to have direction behind it. It has to have meaning. This is just a game that aims for nothing. It uses the nature of metatextuality and shock horror in order to pretend it's saying something profound but it has no claims to make. It's wearing the husk of a better game.
Some people may be surprised to see that I dislike this game so much because I relate so heavily to Yuri's struggles with borderline personality disorder prior to the obnoxious creepypasta-ification. I do like Yuri and her portrayal.
I just wish she was in a game that stood for something.
Undertale manages this flawlessly. The metatext intersects with the text in a beautiful way, the game recontextualizing the nature of video games themselves. When Flowey tells you that to 100% a game is to exhaust it of its meaning, of it being a world you could inhabit (not in those exact words, mind you, that would be a little too blunt for my liking) and draw upon his experiences a player-like entity, it made me think about the way I played video games. The way I interacted with the art form on the whole. Had I been making games worse for myself by 100%ing them? Had I been stripping them of their meaning by hollowing them out?
Doki Doki Literature Club! doesn't bother with messaging. Doki Doki Literature Club! consists of a game that interacts with metatext but only in its aesthetics, it uses it to say nothing and do nothing. When you reach the big twist of the game about halfway through, that it was actually self-aware akin to a creepypasta game, the game doesn't ever move on from that. It wears the guise of making commentary on visual novels, but never says anything specific. What am I supposed to take away from this experience?
What even is Doki Doki Literature Club! about? Who is it about? It's often cited as a satire of visual novels, but satire has to have direction behind it. It has to have meaning. This is just a game that aims for nothing. It uses the nature of metatextuality and shock horror in order to pretend it's saying something profound but it has no claims to make. It's wearing the husk of a better game.
Some people may be surprised to see that I dislike this game so much because I relate so heavily to Yuri's struggles with borderline personality disorder prior to the obnoxious creepypasta-ification. I do like Yuri and her portrayal.
I just wish she was in a game that stood for something.
Reviewed on May 09, 2022