Allow me to direct you guys to Doki Doki Literature Club. For the uninitiated, at first glance Doki Doki Literature Club looks like a traditional dating sim visual novel. It's a genre that's popular in Japan and has a distinct subculture among American gamers (usually self identifying as fans of Japanese culture) and not something that I would ever touch with a ten foot pole.
Generally speaking, the target audience for the type of game Doki Doki Literature Club appears be are guys and a few girls looking to fulfill a dating fantasy with the perfect girlfriend. I'm not against dating sims, nor do I care if you're someone who plays them. Romance themed games just aren't my thing.
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| One of the main characters Monika welcoming you to the game. |
Now, if you aren't familiar with the game and don't want me to spoil it for you, please go download and play it or watch a Let's Play. The game is free to download on Steam and the creator's website.
SPOILERS AHEAD PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!
To be honest, if I hadn't been asked to become familiar with it, this incredibly interesting game would have likely remained off my radar. I am not the target audience for it.
Doki Doki Literature Club starts out by giving the player a warning that the player will be confronted with several disturbing scenarios and actively discourage players from continuing if they suffer from depression and/or anxiety. This message feels extremely out of place given that the game presented as a cute dating sim fulfilling a male fantasy.
For the first two hours or so of game play, the player is presented with multiple scenarios and mini-games designed as means of getting closer to three of the four beautiful high school girls vying to be your love interest. As I stated earlier, I AM NOT THE TARGET AUDIENCE FOR THIS TYPE OF GAME. Thus I was a bit bored watching all the teeth rotting cuteness, while also trying to figure out when the "disturbing content" would show up.
There were also a couple of things that seriously irked me throughout this part of the game. Number one being why the hell would all these girls fall in love with the bland protagonist (insert my eye twitching). I understood that it was a self-insert (young) male fantasy, but come on! Number two being that the character I would have chosen to flirt with, wasn't an option. As I wasn't the one playing the game (remember I was watching a Let's Play), I wasn't as annoyed by this. All it did was make me wonder what this was going to lead to.
Two hours pass and finally, finally, something interesting (at least to me) happens. One of the characters admits to having depression. Well, okay, that's new. Mental illness is something that is rarely address in gaming in general and it fits with the warnings given. It was also hinted at from the beginning of the game. I started wondering if each of the characters had some kind of mental illness and the eventual objective was to help them find the resources they need.
That would have been an interesting change up of genre. Instead of straight romance, the game could easily shift to a dramatic hurt/comfort and friendship narrative.
Nope, I was wrong. This game is straight up psychological horror.
The first part of the game ends with a shocking scene (which I refuse to spoil) and you are back at the start screen. However this time, all of the save files were gone and one of the girls has completely vanished. To get back her file, you have to uninstall the game and then reinstall it. The person I was watching just hit "start new game", wondering if the game was still playable with the obvious glitch.
Oh, yes the game is still playable. It's also where the rapid switch in genre happens.
This game goes from cute romance, which is still NOT MY THING, to psychological horror, which is TOTALLY MY THING!
Now I'm completely invested in the bland self-insert protagonist, what's going on with the three remaining girls, and what bat-[censored]-crazy thing will happen next. Is it just a game glitch? It doesn't seem like it is. It feels like the game is supposed to continue this way.
I finally came to understand why my friend was into this game and why it was blowing up on the Internet (or at least the parts of the Internet I frequent). It was the same "ah ha" moment I had when trying to understand why My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic had become insanely popular, especially for young men.
I finished watching the Let's Play, glad I hadn't actually played the game for myself because my poor future in-law would have had a lot of freaked out texts from me (they work with computers). I probably would have thought my laptop had gotten a virus from the game, especially since it's free. That's how much of a mind-[censored] I feel this game is.
Doki Doki Literature Club stands out because of it's unique ability to present itself as one thing and turn out completely different. I don't think this game would have worked if the creators hadn't tapped into several genre and gamer stereotypes when creating it.
Not only the use of genre, but how the horror is so unexpected for the player. These types of games tend to present the potential love interests as being the perfect "waifu" or a character who is "the perfect wife" for a guy. Waifus don't exist in real life. They are a fantasy. Dating sims are fantasies to obtain the perfect girl out of a bunch of other potentially perfect girls clamoring for the player's attention.
But what if the fantasy becomes a little too real?
The closest similarity of this game game is the Gravity Falls episode "Soos and the Real Girl". A character buys a dating sim to learn how to ask out a real woman and ends up getting stalked by the dating sim's main character, .GIFfany, through other electronic devises.
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| Behind all that cuteness is an evil AI. |
The difference in Doki Doki Literature Club and the Gravity Falls episode is that the main character experiencing these events are men (or at least supposed to be men by Doki Doki game logic), not a woman who is usually stereotyped into these story lines. It's a brilliant play on genre, expectations, and psychological horror.
So, do I like Doki Doki Literature Club? Yes, I think it's a pretty cool game and deserves the buzz that's been building around it.
Would I go out of my way to play it for myself? No, those first two hours a pain for someone who isn't into romance and can't stand bland self-insert characters that don't have the option to make the choices I would make in their situation. The following three hours of mind[censored]ery would probably freak me out to the point that I would have an anxiety attack over whether or not my computer has been infected with a virus.
Play at your own risk.
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Until next week.
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