This article accommodates big spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club.
Doki Doki Literature Club grew to become a shock hit when it launched on Steam in September final yr, and with good motive. It could look unsuspecting, even lovely, however Doki Doki transforms from a lighthearted visible novel right into a twisted, unnerving story of horror that performs in your thoughts lengthy after you may have completed with it.
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It begins with you becoming a member of the titular membership, of which 4 ladies – Monika, Sayori, Natsuki, and Yuri – are the one different members. At first, you spend time with the women as you contemplate who you want to date, whereas hints concerning the sport’s true nature are subtly dropped. Sayori is depressed, which pulls at your heartstrings and prompts you to turn into the ray of sunshine in her life. Your typical setup for an uplifting courting sim, proper? Wrong. Fall into this sort of emotion-baiting lure and also you, like me, will expertise a number of gut-wrenching horrors earlier than the credit roll.
Doki Doki’s biggest software is its means to shock. Once you hit the primary, stunning twist you might be dragged into its deranged story, desperate to see what might probably occur subsequent. What spooked me most wasn’t the violence or leap scares, however how the builders wrestle management away from you and put it firmly into the palms of Monika. It is an excellent and unnerving strategy to break the fourth wall.
As Monika desires consideration from you she strikes your cursor when you’re making decisions and eliminates various routes in order that the main target is, ultimately, completely on her. She additionally is aware of in case you are recording the gameplay and addresses you about it straight – you, that’s, sat at your PC, not the character inside the sport.
Monika may delete the opposite ladies within the sport – at one level you must dig into the sport information your self – however first she contorts and amplifies their most notable persona traits. The textual content is garbled and their faces start to vanish or turn into unsettlingly reasonable – Yuri’s massive anime eyes are changed with smaller, extra genuine eyes that go searching.
With Monika enjoying puppet grasp, Sayori’s melancholy is amplified in order that she turns into suicidal. Yuri’s OCD takes a horrendous flip too, as she stabs herself in a twisted expression of affection, leaving solely her corpse behind. These moments are haunting and require some deep breaths to get by. The sport drops none of its cutesy manner all through all of this – the distinction of presentation and what’s taking place by some means makes it worse.
But whereas the sport is horrifying on numerous ranges, Doki Doki Literature Club can be tragic, and at its coronary heart is a saddening story. The extra I take into consideration Monika and her motives the extra this turns into clear. She is delegated to being a side-character and is aware of she won’t be given the chance to flourish. She comes after you as you might be her solely connection to the true world, a world the place she will exist past her goal within the sport – that’s treasured to her.
This therapy of sport characters as in the event that they have been actual individuals, with feelings and wishes, is more and more prevalent in our world as we develop synthetic intelligence. In truth, celebrated TV sequence Black Mirror explored this precise thought within the episode USS Callister. Yet, Doki Doki Literature Club is ready to drag us into the techno-paranoia nightmare extra successfully because it subverts the videogame format to take management from us straight.
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