Just. Press. Start.
On a September Day in 2017, a man named Dan Salvato decided to upload a game that he and his team created. This cute little game was called Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC). This game took the internet by storm. Almost overnight YouTube, a popular video sharing site, was flooded with playthroughs and series showing this game. The game was shown to be a small cute dating simulator game. These kinds of games are usually geared toward men and have cute anime styled girls to get closer to and date. These games are normally very soft and cute. The writing is very simple and cute. This is where DDLC changes things.
This game was created to lure you into a false sense of safety. It starts out with you meeting your childhood friend before school. Her name is Sayori. You walk to school as you get to know her, you start to like this character a lot. She is very cute, nice and she helps u out a lot. As the story continues you meet three other girls of varying styles, this is normal for dating simulators. These girls being: dark and brooding, Yuri, sweet and brash: Natsuki, and smart and beautiful Monika. Although Monika isn’t one of your choices to hang out with, she is very important to this story. Having more than one love interest gives the player more choice as they play. In DDLC this choice has no bearing on the story. When I played, I chose Sayori she is the cutest to me and I liked her personality the best. The main character will hang out more with the person you chose. As you get closer to the characters, you can also get cute little pictures of them as well. As the first week ends, you start to realize something is wrong with Sayori. I was genuinely very concerned with how she was doing. The first time we check on her, she talks about her having depression and how she is trying to cope with it. She tells us not to worry, but the next day she is late to walk to school with us. My character tries to go check on her and we are greeted with the first of many, traumatizing sights that make this game what it is. Our best friend, Sayori has taken her life. This is the start of the game showing its true face.
At this point the game restarts itself. You return to the home screen and notice that Sayori isn’t there anymore. Her figure is replaced by a corrupted mixture of her sprite and Monika’s. This is the start of Monika’s meddling. We start up the game again and we get the same sequence as the start, but now Sayori isn’t there and the game glitches out and starts over. The way this simulates a normal computer crashing further immerses us into the game world. As if the characters aren’t programmed to do that, and that there is something very wrong going on. You are back at the beginning, but no one except you remembers Sayori, it’s as if she was deleted from the game. You continue the game and meet the girls again. As you play you start seeing more and more of the glitching. The girls will randomly freak out on screen and say things that don’t seem to belong inside of a dating simulator. Seeing these scenes with outright gore or swearing from these cute little anime characters is pretty jarring. It’s something that you start to not want to see or continue with the possibility of seeing. The controls of the game are very simple, so the only thing keeping you from reading these disturbing stories is you pressing space and your own curiosity. The game continues to get more and more disturbing, and each of the girls keep destroying themselves. Except for Monika. After the rest of the girls are gone, you are alone with Monika. She talks directly to us behind the screen, saying that she wants to be with us forever.
After she is done talking with us, we are stuck at this screen, forever. There is a way to end the game though. You have to go to the files of the game and delete Monika’s character file. Once you do that, Monika disappears and the game ends. This game is revolutionary for how it makes players, feel and how they use the medium of the game maker. This game lures people into a false sense of security. The cutesy music and the anime character sprites are used perfectly. They character sprites change as the game get darker, they become glitchy and gory when the game asks for it. This puts on the façade that Monika is truly hacking your game.
I also believe that the developers really utilized the medium of a dating simulator game on a computer to show this story to its fullest. The fact that you can change the files in the game and change what happens Is amazing. Utilizing the game files to give more interactivity make the player feel more in control and feel like the game is real. While this game does have a lot going for it, it does have some faults. The game doesn’t have much replay ability to it. After one play through, you’ve seen pretty much all there is to see. Also, the game can be very triggering. It goes into things like self-harm, suicide, and abuse. Although they do put a trigger warning, saying that people shouldn’t play the game if they are sensitive to those things.
I believe that DDLC really challenges how we make choices, and how we see interaction. As we play the game, we get choices that we think will change the games ending. Although, towards the end we realize that we weren’t meant to have a happy ending with any of the girls. We are meant to “be with” Monika. We have no real autonomy in this game. Monika, who has control of the code, is the one with the code, because of this I have to wonder. Is this supposed to be related to how we perceive life? We try to make decisions, but ultimately do we have any control over our lives? Only to be forced into doing what we don’t want to do for the rest of our lives. The only way for us to break free from the cycle is to take control our selves and change the code. Until we do that we will just have to imagine our future if we had done that.
