wow, uhhh... i hate to be harsh on a game some of my friends clearly like a lot but this is not good??

the first playthrough is pretty miserable to sit through. if you were on the internet in 2017 and know the twist, it's a painful wait until the game gets "good". even ignoring that, none of these characters have any sense of depth (Monika aside, but at this point in the game she's still acting pretty bland). You can tell the game is trying to jab at dating sim tropes, but it doesn't mean anything when it just uses the tropes anyways. "Wow, isn't it weird that in dating sims every single person here wants to go out with you?" and then the game does exactly that without really expanding on it. The point of the first half is obviously to lull you into a false sense of security, but for me personally, had I not known the twist I probably would have dropped it before I even got there. Every day at the club offers basically nothing if you're not in it for the wish fulfillment, which I'm certainly not. And even then, as I said before, like none of these characters have any depth to them so I'd think it'd be pretty hard to really care about any of them (foreshadowing: this comes back to hurt the game later on!)

When you get to the second playthrough and the game goes into "hyperrealistic blood" mode, the game gets a tad better, but it's still really held back by the trope-laden writing. Even with an entire main character missing, a lot of the dialogue is recycled from the first playthrough without the option to skip most of it. There's a couple interesting moments around here, particularly when Monika starts overwriting the script and changing what other characters say, but 80-90% of the time the story's still consumed by boring and tropey dialogue. The conclusion of it, that being Yuri's death and the multi-day time passage that comes with it, is definitely the best (and boldest) moment of the game but it really doesn't justify the 2 and a half hours of mediocrity and eye-roll-worthy dialogue that precedes it.

This is the point where the game goes all out on breaking the fourth wall and Monika talks directly to the player. I don't think breaking the fourth wall this thoroughly necessarily dooms the game's universe and characters, but when pretty much the only thing shown of any of them doesn't broach beyond establishing that X character is supposed to be Y trope (shy edgy girl, childhood friend, cutesy but brash) it's not very hard to believe that they're programs and that they don't actually have free will. This extends to Monika as well; all of the characters, Monika included, are pretty obviously designed just to fall for the MC. Monika discovering the rules of her universe didn't "give" her sentience, she's just doing the exact same thing she's programmed to do, just with a new tool at her disposal. This makes deleting her character file (something she all but tells you to explicitly do) a pretty easy thing to do.

The last section of the game is just another repeat of the first day. Monika's gone but once again it pans out basically the same way (but not exactly so you're not allowed to click the skip button). Eventually Monika comes back and deletes everything again and plays piano and sings a song to the player. The end. I know there's some other minor endings but I'm not going to play them because this is as far as most people play anyways.

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DDLC, I'm sure, is better when you go in blind. But if the only draw in a piece of writing is the fact that certain twists happen, and not how they happen, how is the game any different than a Wikipedia plot synopsis? DDLC is a game that has some good ideas but utterly fumbles its execution time and time again throughout the whole playthrough. Horror is much like comedy in that it needs a buildup for the punchline to hit. DDLC could have used the first act to slowly build up the horror (and admittedly the only time this game really does this right is at the very end of act 1 during the leadup to the death of sayori) but act 2 is filled with punchlines with no leadup. The game is still happy dating sim whatever and then a character sprite is glitched out oohh spooky before things go right back to normal, just in time for the next scary moment 2 minutes from now. Things happen but there's no gravity to any of it and before you can blink it's all deleted anyways. I think a lot of people like this game because "oh look X fucked up thing happened that means its dark!!" but the game has no tact in handling these things. Two characters commit suicide but you don't even get a tangible reason why, just a vague "whoops monika sure did mess things up right?" (the most you get is sayori's confession that she's depressed, but it's clear that this is something Monika added, not something that has always been true). It's hard to sympathize with any of them when you don't really know anything about them. The game doesn't give the characters themselves the light of day, only the archetypes they're meant to represent, and as a consequence there's no gravity to anything that happens.

tl;dr: the first half is boring no gf wish fulfillment and the second half is creepypasta. ddlc half-asses both and they're both worse in combination because of it.