Review: Doki Doki Literature Club!

This review will be as spoiler free as humanly possible - but Doki Doki Literature Club is a game that is best experienced totally blind - do bear that in mind. 

Also, the game opens with a disclaimer and discretion agreement - “this game is unsuitable for children or those who are easily disturbed,” - Doki Doki Literature Club touches upon some rather heavy subject matter, including mental health issues like depression and anxiety, self harming, suicide and themes of abuse. The script is so well written, that as a player who has personally experienced some of these topics first hand, they can hit very close to home - and while I hesitate to use this word, as the Internet has made a mockery of it - some parts can be triggering. So please exercise some caution.

Upon first glance, Doki Doki Literature Club presents itself as a cutesy light-hearted visual novel/dating simulator in which you play an unseen and unnamed male protagonist with 3 of 4 potential girls to attempt to woo. The visuals are heavily anime-inspired, complete with Japanese schoolgirls sporting brightly coloured hair, unnatural eye colours and suggestive school uniforms. However, this is a mere crust - the first “act” of the game is a total facade resting upon a heavy and incredibly dark and disturbing series of acts that explore the sort of themes a psychological horror game would.

The story itself is fairly simple - your childhood friend Sayori encourages you to join an after-school extra-curricular club - specifically, the literature club. You go along to humour her and meet the other 3 members - Natsuki, Yuri and the club president Monika. Bribed with cupcakes, flirty girls and offers to read new manga - you agree to join. The girls suggest the four of you begin writing poems to share with one another in an attempt to improve each others’ writing skills and confidence.

This introduces the poetry writing mechanic. Each night after attending the literature club - you're presented with this screen - in which you must click 20 different words to include in your poem. This is also how you begin to appeal and build a closer relationship with one of the specific girls - as each has their own preferences of the sort of vocabulary they like to read. 

Sayori enjoys bittersweet poetry, including emotional words and words relating to human connections - such as family, romance, promise, sadness and happiness. Natsuki likes cutesy words and themes and thus favours words like marshmallow, bouncy, kitty, puppy and candy. Yuri presents herself as the most experienced writer and thus prefers more elaborate words and words that touch on darker themes, such as contamination, suicide, graveyard, destruction and massacre.

Upon presenting whatever kind of poem you write to the other girls, they too will show you what they wrote - and as the story progresses, all of their writing becomes more intense and emotional, revealing the secrets of their home lives, their mental state and their true intentions. 

At the end of act 1 however, as all seems to be progressing well, one of the girls will commit suicide - and the game begins to act in very bizarre ways. It seems like one or more of the games’ characters has achieved self awareness and is physically deleting and altering the actual game files contained with YOUR OWN computer. Keep an eye on the games’ directory and you'll see files appearing and disappearing - and lines of text will be added to the games’ program log.

Act 2 is filled with weird visual glitches, distorted music and sound effects and corrupted text. Some lines of dialogue will even be outright changed and on occasion your mouse cursor will move on its own.

In addition, the overall theme of the game will now dramatically change - characters’ dialogue will include more profanity and out-of-character expressions. Sometimes you will be unable to read what they're saying, as they will instead spit out garbled lines of corrupted text.  Their facial expressions will often change too, behaving in truly inhuman and disturbing ways.

Interestingly, there are dozens of pre-programmed glitchy occurrences but not all players will experience them - as they may change depending on the choices you make and some have a small chance of even happening in the first place - ranging from a 33% chance to a minimum of 1% chance of an event even happening - allowing for each player to get a different experience.

Even more things happen outside of the game - as previously mentioned, the games’ directory will spew out random text files and images - some tech savvy players even opened the character files and decoded them into text or images. Some files at first glance simply contained garbled text characters - but were actually haunting messages encoded in base-64 or binary.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a rare example of a game that literally has no excuse NOT to be played. Why? It's available right now for download from its official website or via Steam for the low low price of FREE. That's right - you will receive around 3-5 hours of gameplay and some truly disturbing existential horror for literally nothing. So close this window, open your Steam client and get ready to witness some seriously fucked-up psychological horror, cold blooded existential dread and watch your computer get manipulated by in-game characters with nothing you can do about it.