Go! Go! GOTY! 2017: Game Two: Doki-Doki Literature Club

• Game: Team Salvato's Doki Doki Literature Club.
• Release Month: September.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 02/12.
• Completed (?): 02/12.

It's odd, this game was released in September but I hadn't heard about it until a couple of weeks ago when the mod team's very own Anime Editor ZombiePie told me to give it a look. Seeing it was free and all, I added it to the docket for Go! Go! GOTY! and promptly forgot all about it. Since then, I've seen various major LP type folks try it out, from Waypoint's Patrick Klepek (who, as everyone knows, loves anime a whole bunch) to the Game Grumps. The game's Steam page and intro screen are also positively festooned with warnings for the easily disturbed and tags like "psychological horror", so... if the game had a twist, it wasn't doing a good job of concealing them (though I suppose given the subject matter, some forewarning wasn't unwarranted).

Doki-Doki Literature Club, since I'm not going to be able to maintain kayfabe throughout, is an anime visual novel made with the Ren'Py VN creation tool. It features a faceless protagonist, the player, and four teenage girls who are part of their highschool's eponymous Literature Club. Sayori is the ditzy best friend who has known you since you were ankle-biters, Yuri is the shy and intense one who is self-conscious about her height and hobbies, Natsuki is the pink-haired argumentative one with a pointy tooth and a fondness for cute things, and Monika is the strait-laced President of the club who is very popular due to her looks and academic prowess. You know, stereotypes. The game flirts, perhaps far too long, with the facade of a standard dating sim where the player is rarely asked to do anything besides click through dozens of lines of lighthearted text and occasionally answer some major multiple-choice questions that changes the direction of the story, before it eventually becomes something... well, not quite so wholesome.

It's difficult to talk around that last bit when discussing this game critically, honestly, because it probably goes without saying that the weird stuff is the reason you're here at all. Seeing how it messes with you, how it throws your previous decisions back in your face, how it subverts the mechanics and clichés of the medium, and how it's not about literature much at all. It's about obsession, depression, aggression, oppression and confessions, but that's really all a digression: it's really more about why people play these games looking for relationships that mean nothing in a fictional world where all your character's dialogue is pre-selected and women fall in love with you almost regardless of how you treat them. It's a complete mindscrew, in so many words, and given that it's available for free it's definitely worth seeing it work its magic for yourself even if you only have a passing interest in the subject matter. I have a number of issues with how it goes about its business and how long it takes before reality starts to crumble, but there's no denying that there's some smart ideas here, even if they're clearly inspired by the likes of Undertale and Frog Fractions and imscared and other games fond of meta trickery.

By all means check it out. Though, uh, do keep in mind it can get pretty intense at times. "Doki-doki" means heart-pounding, after all.

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