Doki Doki Literature Club! Review

A few days ago I saw someone on Reddit (r/visualnovels) recommending this game. It’s a galgame on Steam called Doki Doki Literature Club!. Of course, when it was recommended I noticed the tag: Psychological Horror. I could sort of guess what that meant. This game, made by non-Japanese gaijin imitating a Japanese-style galgame, looks all harmonious and beautiful on the Steam page, but inside it’s probably a scam. There might be some “depressing” elements in there.

“Depressing” — how depressing can you get? The heroine suddenly dies, suddenly loses her head, suddenly goes yandere, suddenly chops you up. That’s about the limit. At most it’s blood splattering all over the screen. What haven’t I seen? So curiosity made me download this free game and click “Start.”

After a thrilling adventure, I repeatedly confirmed that the game had really, truly “End"ed, and only then did my heart settle back down. I let out a long sigh…

Let me shamelessly brag for a moment. As a forever-alone otaku who’s been single since 2013, who’s too old to find a partner and keeps failing at arranged dates, I’ve played nearly several hundred galgames over these four years and written over a hundred impression posts. For a while I was playing galgames almost indiscriminately. Among them were plenty with crazy plot twists and horror content, but I was immune to almost all of them. Even that Sakura no Mori † Dreamers with evil spirits all over the screen, Honoakari no Toki no Hate Yori with blood-spraying zombies everywhere, the sudden hanging in Midori no Umi, the dismembered limbs in Hakoniwa Logic — all small stuff. Games like Clockup’s are even more whatever. I just smirk, completely unfazed.

Out of all the games I’ve played, only two actually scared me. One was the sudden decapitated-head CG that pops up in 3days. The other… is this game. Doki Doki Literature Club!.

There’s only one reason it scared me: it was sudden, way too sudden, no preparation whatsoever.

Looking back after finishing it, I can say clearly: overall, Doki Doki Literature Club! is not a romance sim. It’s more like a horror game.

Yeah, don’t be fooled by all the promotional material or the people in the comments saying how interesting it is. This really is a horror game. At the start it repeatedly emphasizes: if you have a weak mental constitution, don’t play; if you’re a kid, don’t play; if you’re a scaredy-cat, don’t play. That sentence is serious, not a joke!

I know a lot of young folks can’t handle even a little “cruelty” in a galgame. I’ve seen people get spooked by the music in Hatsuyuki Sakura, people devastated because the little sister dies in Kami no Ue no Mahoutsukai, people who can’t take how tragic the mermaid princess is in Suisou Ginka no Istoria, and people who want to mail razor blades to Niijima Yuu because the heroine in a story-within-a-story doesn’t get a happy ending in Majo Koi Nikki. For those people, stay the hell away from this game. It is not a romance game. It’s a horror game, a horror metagame in the same style as Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi.

The game starts out totally normal. You’re the protagonist, pushed by your childhood friend Sayori (did the author play too much Nekopara?) into joining the school’s Literature Club — the kind of literary club common in Japanese high schools. In the club there’s the president Monika, the vice-president Yuri, and a tsundere named Natsuki. Everything’s so normal. The literature club meets every day, and the activity is to write poems at home and bring them in to exchange.

Actually there are branches here. Each heroine lets slip what style of words she likes, and when writing poems you pick words matching that style. Pick right and the corresponding heroine’s icon in the bottom left bounces. If you pick enough words catering to a girl, she’ll show you affection when you exchange poems.

In the first playthrough, at a certain point the relationship between Sayori and the protagonist starts to change. They often go to and from school together. But Sayori soon starts showing abnormalities — she doesn’t want to get out of bed in the morning, her mood gets worse and worse, her body weaker and weaker. The protagonist gets worried, goes to visit, and finds the normally cheerful Sayori utterly depressed, even starting to doubt the meaning of being alive.

“Why get out of bed?” “Why study?” “Why live?”

After some comforting, Sayori finally feels a bit better, and even confesses to the protagonist. He’s overjoyed. But the next day when he goes to school, Sayori doesn’t show up again.

Monika from the literature club tells the protagonist she knows some things about Sayori, then shows him a weird poem she says Sayori wrote. The protagonist gets worried and heads straight to Sayori’s house. Like last time, he opens the door… and looks…

Holy shit, Sayori’s hanged herself…

Sayori’s death is way too gruesome. The game maliciously gives you a close-up of her dead face, plus that extremely creepy music, and it scared a cold sweat right out of me.

I was just about to investigate why Sayori died… when the game suddenly glitched out with garbled text. After a burst of corruption, the game forcibly restarts. Back at the main menu, I was stunned…

Sayori in the original main menu is also corrupted now…

Starting the game is also corrupted. When I clicked it, the game started from the beginning, but something felt off everywhere. Even the part at the start where you’re supposed to meet Sayori was all garbled. There was no trace of Sayori in the game at all…

I tried loading my first-playthrough save, back when Sayori was still there. The save gave an error, telling me the file “sayori” doesn’t exist.

It felt like Sayori had been erased from the game.

But the game could still continue. The literature club had Natsuki, Yuri, and Monika left. Same routine: write poems every day and share them. Here you can freely choose to hang out with Natsuki or Yuri. I never picked Monika because her option never showed up…

Whether you pick Natsuki or Yuri, when you talk to them they suddenly say really unpleasant things like “Fuck you,” “Fuck Monika,” “You bastard.” And Natsuki and Yuri, who were fine before, suddenly start fighting for no reason. Monika always breaks it up, and after doing so she says to you: “Oh, those two are always fighting like this. Whatever, come take a walk with me.”

Still, the game continues. You can keep choosing to pursue Natsuki or Yuri.

If you choose Natsuki, she suddenly loses control and turns into a scary garbled ghost face, like this…

If you choose Yuri, she becomes more and more unhinged, eventually yelling at you: “Why did you pick me? You could’ve gone to Monika!”

Later the game gives you a choice between Yuri and Natsuki. No matter who you pick, the screen glitches out, and finally a giant Monika blocks your options with her body, telling you to stop choosing and come take a walk.

By now Natsuki and Yuri have both gone insane. Natsuki doesn’t even have a face anymore, yelling at you:

“Yuri and I are both total idiots. We don’t deserve you. Why don’t you go for the better Monika?”

You still get a chance to choose Natsuki, Yuri, or Monika. The options appear again, but now the mouse automatically points at Monika infinitely. You can force-click someone else — I chose Yuri.

The choice is invalid. A screen full of Monikas pops up. You have no choice.

Then the insane Yuri pulls out a knife and stabs herself over and over, collapsing in a pool of blood. Here the game goes completely garbled. Even if you fast-forward, it takes ten minutes. Yuri in the pool of blood spends three days and nights in the classroom like that, the corpse goes cold, and you just watch her die.

After that Monika appears again, saying she has some work to do. Then a console appears in the top left, two lines of commands, showing that the data for Yuri and Natsuki has been deleted… Then the game gives you a choice:

Just Monika.

The game starts again. No title, no one else. It goes straight into a new screen. Monika on the other side of the screen is watching you.

“Now we can finally be together.”

Monika says with a smile.

“I’ve always liked you, loved you deeply, but you always chose other girls. I couldn’t stand it. Then I suddenly realized I could modify this game. You’re playing on Steam, which took me a little time, but whatever. I can still select the game on Steam, right-click properties, find the local game directory, and in the character folder, find the data of the other heroines.”

“At first you went to Sayori, so I modified Sayori’s game script, made her depressed, pessimistic, gave her a suicide ending, and then deleted her data.”

“I thought you’d come back to me, but then you went to Yuri and Natsuki. I modified their dialogue in the game, turned them into unreasonable bitches, and you still wouldn’t choose me. That made me so mad. I decided to get rid of them too.”

“I did all this for you. Now I can finally be with you, forever.”

“Will you be with me?”

The game pops up a choice, only one option: “yes.” No alternative.

“Want to write a poem?”

You can choose to write a poem, but all the word options are “monika.” You have no choice.

“What a nice poem. It’s all my name. You love me, don’t you?”

“Come on, look into my eyes.”

Now there’s only Monika and you, staring at each other… no continuation.

You can try to quit the game, but when you restart, it goes back here, and Monika sarcastically says:

“I saw you try to quit and escape me again. It makes me sad, but it’s no use. I’ll still be here waiting.”

So the game enters an infinite loop. You need to escape it. Where’s the way out?

If Monika can delete the other heroines’ data, can you use the same method to delete her?

The next in-game choice requires you to close the game, open Steam, find the game directory in Steam, go to the character folder, find the only remaining file, monika.chr, delete it, and start the game again.

The Monika staring at you in the game turns into garbled text:

“What did you do! You deleted me? Why would you do that!”

Then the game becomes a void. Monika leaves behind resentful words, and her love and hate for you.

The game suddenly restarts, back to the main menu. Of the original four heroines, only three remain. Monika is simply gone.

You can start the game again, same as the beginning, just without Monika. You can still write poems and flirt with girls, but suddenly the game goes wrong. Your childhood friend Sayori starts saying weird things, and you see Monika in her eyes. Turns out Monika didn’t really leave — Sayori has become the new Monika…

You can choose to refuse. The game suddenly crashes, and Monika on the other side falls into despair.

“There is no happiness here after all”

“Goodbye!”

“Since you don’t like me, then… this game itself can be destroyed too!”

Monika says goodbye to you in despair, and the whole game starts deleting itself. The terminal in the top left keeps deleting the game’s own files. Finally a girl’s voice appears, in English, but you can understand it.

“hello? Can you hear me? I wrote a song for you..please listen…and Bye.”

Music slowly plays — the song Monika sang for you. The game reaches its end, and ED staff credits float by during the deletion.

The final game screen is a letter from Monika to you. In it she says how much she liked you in the game world, but you rejected her, she’s lost all hope, and she says farewell forever. At the end she even remembers to thank the other members of the literature club.

It feels like Monika is saying it’s all your fault…

After that the game is unusable. Opening it just shows this letter and data errors. You have to redownload it on Steam to play again.

First, this game shows off the power of Ren’Py, the Python-based galgame engine. It can do lots of special effects, even the wild trick of “requiring the player to go into the game directory and delete a file to continue.” But as a galgame, the romance part is almost nonexistent. Aside from the slightly interesting confession between the protagonist and Sayori in the first playthrough, most of the time the game sits in a “creepy” atmosphere. The turning point is Sayori’s suicide.

The CG of Sayori’s suicide was so sudden. I absolutely didn’t expect it. I was shocked… oh wait, not shocked, startled.

After seeing Sayori’s death and the inexplicable corruption that followed, I realized this game is probably a metagame — the heroine is talking not to the “protagonist” inside the game, but to “you” on the other side of the screen. It’s a game that jumps out of its own box.

See, the game itself was modified by Monika because of her love for “you.” For your sake she deleted the other heroines just to be with you. You rejected her and deleted her file instead. She was heartbroken and deleted the whole game. That’s the game.

After Sayori’s death, I was in a state of “every bush is an enemy” the whole time. You never know when the game will suddenly go wrong. And indeed it does go wrong: sudden corruption, sudden dead faces, weird poem lines, hand-drawn Sayori floating by, various tampered swear-filled dialogue, and later even black-and-white TV flashback effects like a horror movie. Without a guarded heart, you’ll get scared again. I was tense the whole time.

You know how exhausting it is to play an AVG that scares you at the start and then keeps you on edge the whole time?! That level of mental tension only happens in Corpse Party!

Many people will be reminded of the famous metagame Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi, but Doki Doki Literature Club! does more with the details. In the second playthrough, if you try to load a first-playthrough save, Monika pops up and says “You’re interesting. Trying to cheat? No way.” In the third playthrough, trapped in Monika’s space, you can’t save. When you try, it says “Saving is meaningless now. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.” And if you quit and restart in the third playthrough, you’re back face-to-face with Monika. No chance to escape.

Many of the effects are fabricated but very convincing, including the errors about missing character files for Natsuki, Sayori, Yuri, etc. They’re all scripted effects. The final missing game files might also be an effect, but they all create a sense of realism for this metagame.

I have to say, the Ren’Py engine is better than Japan’s ancestral stuff, and it’s open-source and multiplatform. No idea why nobody uses it.

Another detail: Steam says Doki Doki Literature Club! only supports Mac OSX and Windows, not Linux. But if you extract the game files, you’ll find a bash launch script inside. After chmod +x it runs on Linux with no problems, no need to install many Python packages. No idea why the official release doesn’t support Linux.

Taken as a whole, Doki Doki Literature Club! is a bad end. And for something billed as a romance game, it doesn’t put much work into the romance at all — all the effort went into jump-scaring you and looking cool doing it. Outside of one short branching stretch in the middle, the game is a straight line, and you can’t actually pursue Yuri or Natsuki. I saw there’s DLC on sale, maybe that’s where the actual routes live. Either way, the deception on Doki Doki Literature Club!’s Steam page is genuinely not cool. It isn’t for everyone. It suits streamers, it suits people who chase weird shit, it suits the I’ll-try-anything types like me — and even then it still gets you.

What I keep coming back to is the gap between Doki Doki Literature Club! and Japan’s Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi. Japanese games love to ladle out the chicken soup — no matter how unhinged things get, the ending usually swings back to something fundamental and hands you a “pure love” feeling. Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi ends exactly like that, Clock up’s games do it constantly, Imouto Choukyou Nikki is more or less the same, and so is that game where the little sister throws out her brother’s porn. So people who play these twisted games get to the fairly normal ending and go “ah, mysteriously moving.” Doki Doki Literature Club! isn’t made in Japan. It’s from gringos, and gringos don’t do chicken soup. So when Monika gets rejected by the protagonist at the end, there’s no pure love waiting — the ending arrives alongside the game destroying itself.

Honestly the plot isn’t beyond saving. Tweak it — make Monika a “female ghost haunting the game” — and it gets more coherent. A ghost hiding inside the game, hoping the player on the other side falls in love with her so she can escape, tampering with game data to make it happen, and finally getting deleted wholesale by the protagonist. As a horror game, that passes. It even has a bit of that Prince Ma “She Died on Discord” feel.

But the game doesn’t do that. It chose to disguise itself instead…

As for whether I support this game — my taste is all over the place, so yeah, I support it. Would I recommend it? Something this bait-and-switch, even with all the warnings plastered inside? You know those don’t work. What if some kid gets scared to tears? So no, not recommended.

Anyway, Monika, rest easy out there.

Some addenda below:

I reinstalled the game today out of idle curiosity and found that it does start with four character files, one per heroine.

The first one is an explosion. The second is a ghost image. The third is a scream sound file. The fourth is a pile of nonsense that looks vaguely like an MD5 hash.

So I figured I’d try deleting monika.chr directly and see what happens. Sayori told me to wait a moment… the game suddenly closed, and I launched it again…

And then I found Sayori’s file had permanently self-erased… launching just shows her hanging, the game is completely broken…

So is there a way out?

Yes!

touch sayori.chr

The game lives!

I unpacked the game and found a bunch of interesting stuff, including a letter from the developer, presumably the all-CG reward:

The CGs also include a fake blue screen:

And finally there’s Monika singing to you and talking to you:

Steam version review: http://steamcommunity.com/id/plumlis/recommended/698780