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.