Summery
I recently finished playing “Doki Doki Literature Club” (DDLC), and I have to say it is one of my favorites. This plays like a dating sim but is a psychological horror/metagame. DDLC plays with what it means to be a game by making you question your choices and making you feel for the characters. Below are spoilers so if you like the meta-ness of “Undertale”, games as art, or psychological horror games you should play DDLC before reading below. The game is free on Steam, and only takes about 5 hours to complete. I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of horror games so I reviewed spoilers beforehand, but I wish I had not because I missed the full impact of this game.





****Spoilers Below*****





Recap
Act 1 it plays like a normal dating sim, where the main mechanic for winning over the girl you want to date is writing a poem that is inline with her personality. The 4 girls in the club are Monika, Sayori, Yuri, and Nastuki. In typical dating sim style one of the girls are unattainable, Monika, one you have know sense you were young, Sayori, one is quiet and shy, Yuri, and one is aggressive and overcompensating, Nastuki.

On the first day you agree to join the literature club, then for the next 3 days you write a poem before the next day, spend time with the person that you wrote the poem for, share your poems with everyone, and then talking about a festival to help promote the club. On the 3rd day, Sayori is not feeling well and will head home early. After you finish the poem sharing section Monika assigns everyone tasks over the weekend to get ready for the festival on Monday. Monika says Sayori will be helping her and lets you choose who you want to work with. Yuri and Nastuki both protest if you try to choose Sayori or Monika because they are already working together.

Fast-forward to Sunday and you, still have not heard from Sayori but whoever you chose to work with has texted you all weekend. Before your work mate shows up you visit Sayori. You apprehensively enter her room because she does not answer her door. You talk to her and it is clear that she is seriously clinically depressed, even though your character does not notice. After reassuring her the best you are able you had back to your house and spend the afternoon with your workmate. Your workmate shows up and you begin work on your task. While getting ready for the festival you have an awkward, intimate moment with your workmate. After you finish your tasks, when you are saying goodbye to your workmate, you let he know you would be open to going on a date. Your workmate is touched and comes in close to kiss you. Right then Sayori shows up. Your workmate awkwardly backs up and leaves. Sayori then confesses her love to you and you have the option to tell her you love her as well or that she will always be your best friend.

The next day Sayori is late and you walk to school on your own. You meet Monika and she starts making you feel bad for not checking on Sayori. You rush back home to get Sayori out of bed and to school for the festival. You enter her room and Sayori is hanging from the ceiling in a noose. Her body is limp and her eyes are glassy. You can tell she has been dead since the night before.

At this point you see text on the screen that indicating that someone is deleting files from the game. The game glitches, restarts and you enter Act 2.



Act 2 has a similar structure to Act 1. You spend the first 4 days the same, joining the club on day one and spending time, sharing poems, and discussing the festival on days 2-4. All the places where Sayori showed up in Act 1 cause the game to glitch and correct itself. Aside from Sayori missing the main difference is that Yuri is more forceful with spending time with you and, regardless of who you write your poem for on day 2 you spend it with Nastuki and on day 3 and 4 you spend it with Yuri. Also, during this time you come to know something is different about Monika. You might have noticed before but it's obvious now because she does things like stand in front of the dialog box, interrupting decision choices, and revealing that she knows more than she should.

When it comes time to select who you want to work with for the weekend you cursor is pulled to Monika and even if you manage to click a different name the game glitches shows you a pair of eyes and only give you Monika as an option. Once you select Monika the other girls protest but accept it. Yuri asks you to stay behind and then confesses her love to you and asks you if you love her in return. Regardless of your choice she starts to laugh hysterically. Then she takes out a knife and stabs herself twice in the gut and then in the heart. She falls over and you are stuck staring at her lifeless eyes all weekend while jiberish is displayed in dialog box. As the days go by the blood darkens and her eyes turn gray. Finally, Nastuki shows up on monday allowing you to look away from the dead body. She leaves the room, horrified at the sight of the dead Yuri. Monika enters, sees the sight, and apologies that you were stuck in the classroom all weekend. Then she deletes Yuri and Nastuki and restarts the game.



In act 3 there is only Monika. The two of you are in a classroom together and she tells you how she has been trying to manipulate events so that you would choose her from the beginning. She wants to be with you, the player, not the character you are playing. Monika is aware that she is in a game and is in love with the player. She has even looked up your name from your Steam account so she could learn more about you. She will stay in the room talking to you forever and will be waiting if you exit the game. The only way to move on from here is to delete her character file the same way she did to the others. Before she is deleted she feels remorse for getting rid of her friends and restores them. The game restarts again and you are in Act 4.

In Act 4 the game plays like Act 1 except Monika is missing. At the end of the first day, after you join the club, you are getting ready to walk home with Sayori. She thanks you for everything you did, for deleting Monika, and for helping to bring happiness to the club. She then tells you that she will do any to be with you, much the same way as Monika was talking. But someone, presumably Monika, says no and crashes the game. Then Monika speaks to you (not in dialog box) and plays you a song she has been working on sense Act 1. During the song the credits roll and Monika deletes the images of the other girls as they are going by. When her song and the credits are complete she deletes many other game files. Finally you are shown a letter from Monica describing how there was no happiness to be found in the Literature Club and thanking you for being a friend to her and her friends.



Full Review
In DDLC the developers are questioning what it means for a game to be a game. They break the style of a dating sim but combining it with psychological horror, they break agency but giving you almost no real choices, and they break immersion by forcing you to edit the gaming files to continue the game. Aside from all of this we expect the characters in the game to only exist in the game they don’t have a concept of the real world or the player behind the main character.

Agency
The first theme I want to hit on is agency. Typically the whole point in a play a game, rather than watching a movie or reading a book, is that you have the ability to make choices. Many times the story itself doesn’t change but how you complete the story is up to you. For example in Assassins Creed, you can choose how to proceed though the game, what hallways, what speed, what weapons and many other things to complete your goal. But, no matter the choices you make, the story is the same. On the other hand, in a dating sim you tend to have very little choice in the game play but this is made up with multiple endings. In a game with 4 main characters you would expect at least 4 endings.

In DDLC, right off the bat something is different because you never have the option to date Monika. This is a theme throughout all 4 acts and is the drive for Monika to kill of the other characters. But as you explore deeper you can see that you only really have 5 “meaningful” choices in Act 1; the 3 poems that determine who you spend time with during the club meetings, who you work with over the weekend, and whether you confess your love for Sayori or not. But those choices are more like a standard game, you slightly change how you get to the ending but no matter what you choose Act 1 will always end with Sayori, just, hanging there. In Act 2 you don’t have any real choices at all; it doesn’t matter what poems you write you will spend your time with the same people, Monika forces you to choose her for the weekend project, and, regardless of your choice with Yuri’s love confession she stabs herself. Then, as if to drive home the lack of agency, you are forced to stare at Yuri’s dead body for the whole weekend until Nasturi shows up. In Act 3 Monika has taken over the whole game and you have no agency within the game at all. The only choice you have is outside of the game, deleting Monikas character file. And in Act 4 you have no agency at all you don’t even have have a single choice.

Metagame
The second theme is the meta-ness of the game. Metagames are newer type of game that has been started to be made. The term covers a whole slew of things that are traditionally outside the game. Examples of this metagame genre include the following mechanics: characters being aware that they are in a game, characters knowing the player and the main character are different, standard game play elements actually mean something in the game world, interacting with the game by interacting with the game files, and the game maintaining a memory of things that happen outside of the save path.

In DDLC Monica knows she is in a game and she knows you and the main character are not the same and even pulls your ‘real’ name from your Steam account. In addition Monika deleted game files to reshape the game to her liking, sends you messages in the game files trying to reach out, and you need to delete a game file to move on in the story. Finally, DDLC actually has 2 endings; to get the “good” ending, you need to play Act 1 three times before you get to Act 2. Then, in Act 4, Sayori thanks you for taking the time to spend with all of the club members. Monika still sings you her song but doesn't delete the images of the other girls and you are shown a letter from the developer thanking and sharing his passion for games. The implication is that Sayori in Act 4 can see all the choices you made in your other playthroughs. This is unusual because in a typical game you only have a linear path that the game remembers but here you have to play Act 1 3 times then continue one of them through to Act 4. Even though you can only continue one of your playthroughs to Act 2 from a single story line the game still knows that you did all 3 and, by extension, Sayori and presumably Monika knows.

Conclusion
“Doki Doki Literature Club” is an excellent game for its manipulation of what you expect from it. The cutesy dating sim is flipped with the suicide of 2 characters, agency is robbed by supplying almost no meaningful choices, and emersion is destroyed by requiring you to manipulate game files to continue. Even though DDLC barely fits the definition of a game, the fact that it goes out of its way to break these convention is what makes it great.