Fine, you win.
Let’s dust off this old relic I haven’t touched in a couple years to talk about a game from 2017.
Doki Doki Literature Club appears to be a conventional renai game, a vaguely-Japanese high school’s after-school reading club. The personality-free faceless protagonist pursues one of the four romantically-available girls in the club. It is not as conventional as it seems, however, and to discuss how and why is to spoil it. Fair warning: I’m gonna do that. I managed to get from 2017 to when I played it without being spoiled, except in that I knew that there was something to be spoiled.
Any frank discussion of Doki Doki needs two warnings. The first, and least important, is a spoiler warning. It’s impossible to talk about this game on anything but the most superficial level without giving away the fact that it is not a harmless dating simulator. Instead, it has a twist that turns the benign premise on its head. This isn’t simply some “Darth Vader is Luke’s father” dramatic reveal, either: Doki Doki Literature Club is a metatextual mystery game, where much of the mystery is figuring out what sort of game it actually is.
The second, more important, warning: Doki Doki Literature Club is a horror game that uses graphic suicide for lurid shock content. Suffice it to say, I am not a fan.
Doki Doki starts off cheery and conventional. Sayori, your cheery childhood friend, introduces you to the titular afterschool literature club, composed of her, introvert Yuri, outspoken and prickly Natsuki, and confident and popular club president Monika. Each day, the girls share poems that slowly reveal parts of their personality and backstory, while the player-controlled protagonist chooses which girl to pursue romantically in a word-choice minigame.
The romance is conventional, but there are quiet hints that there are problems underneath the surface: Sayori alludes to nagging depression. Yuri hints at the urge to cut herself. Natsuki has a troubled relationship with her father. I sussed these tendencies pretty early on — the hints aren’t exactly subtle — and, since I knew this wasn’t a conventional dating sim, I expected them to take over the game. That wasn’t quite what happened.
Sayori is indeed depressed, and her difficulty coping with this new dynamic between her and the protagonist slowly takes over the story. Either her relationship with or her romantic rejection by the protagonist is too much to handle, and she hangs herself in her bedroom. When the protagonist finds her body, the game glitches out, as the protagonist agonizes over his — your — decisions that led up to this point. It appears for all the world that whatever you chose to do — spend time with Sayori or one of her friends, admit romantic or platonic feelings for Sayori — was the proximate cause for her suicide. The game “ends,” and leads you to a title screen where Sayori’s image is defaced with a glitch.
I don’t know if this could’ve worked for me. I know that it didn’t, because Doki Doki Literature Club tipped its hand. As soon as I saw the protagonist say that “this isn’t some game where I can reset,” I guessed correctly that this was a trick. (It apparently isn’t possible to reload a save from before Sayori’s suicide, although I never tried this.) I didn’t yet know what was going on. However, I did know that I couldn’t trust what this game had to say, even as I hoped that this risk was building up to a worthy reveal. As it turned out, I was right to stop trusting it at this point, and my hopes would be disappointed.
Doki Doki Literature Club appears to end — as though this were the “bad end” of a traditional renai game — and resets back to the title screen. In the second playthrough, Sayori is replaced with a glitch that slowly fades, and her absence is keenly felt. The characters glitch out and become more extreme and unhinged, fighting with each other and revealing the backstories hinted at in the first playthrough. An argument between Yuri and Natsuki that Sayori resolved in the first playthrough escalates, turning subtext into text. Yuri’s obsession with knives has turned into her cutting herself, and Natsuki’s strained relationship with her father appears to have become neglectful. Yuri becomes obsessive and possessive as you are railroaded into a romance with her, while Monika hints at knowing that this is a game and that she’s somehow controlling things behind the scenes.
It initially seems like this is a result of the absence of Sayori’s moderating influence, but Doki Doki abandons any personal drama for creepypasta cliche and deus ex machina. Yuri becomes grotesquely sexually obsessed with the protagonist, then stabs herself to death in a graphic scene, followed by trapping you in the room with her corpse for an entire weekend in-game.
This seems like it would be the low point in most games, but Doki Doki Literature Club manages to outdo itself with the next scene: a cutesy visual reference to a Yume Nikki fanart meme.
Monika now fully takes over the game. She reveals that she’s been aware that she’s in a game the whole time, and has been driving the other characters crazy by amping up their worst tendencies. Her goal is to have the player — not just the blank protagonist — for herself, trapped forever together in a featureless room. This is an ending, of sorts: the only way to move on is to delete Monika’s (supposed) character file from the game’s files using Windows Explorer, “hacking” the game by deleting the file that the game specifically instructs you to delete.
Deleting Monika is a temporary victory. She restores the other characters as she glitches out, leading to one more abbreviated playthrough where everything seems fine without her, until Sayori starts showing signs of the same maniac obsession that consumed Monika. The last vestiges of Monika bring a halt to everything, “deleting” the whole game as the credits roll. (There’s a better ending where Sayori realizes she’s in a game, thanks you for playing the game, and ends it herself instead, but I didn’t get it.)
Doki Doki Literature Club didn’t work for me at all. I can trace its intended emotional arc: hook you with the cute romance, shock you with Sayori’s death and get you to blame yourself, the game becomes cruel and dark to match your emotional state, you realize that Monika is the true architect of this misery and you shift the animus to her, then you reach catharsis by defeating her. However, Doki Doki made a point of reminding me that I am playing a game, a piece of software authored by a person. After the shock suicide twist, I couldn’t suspend disbelief long enough to believe that these are anything like people.
Therefore, my resentment for the lazy suicide shocks lands instead on the author and the game offers no cathartic resolution. That’s where I’m stuck. Doki Doki Literature Club contains suicide and mental illness and dysfunction, but it isn’t about those things. The protagonist tears himself apart the way actual people tear themselves apart when someone close to them commits suicide, but, unlike real suicide, there is indeed a simple, neat explanation for why Sayori killed herself. Sayori always commits suicide because of Monika’s manipulation. Suicide in Doki Doki happens because someone tries to play God, not because of the actual reasons people commit suicide.
Doki Doki Literature Club is a self-referential video game, in lieu of being a story about its characters. Monika’s story of raging against the limitations of being trapped in a video game is too thin to sustain the whole, but her story necessarily sabotages the agency or emotional reality of any of the other characters. It would merely be boring if it weren’t for using mental illness for lazy shock content, which just makes it vaguely distasteful. I should have left this one alone.
