Here is my review of the 2017 point-and-click Doki Doki Literature Club! from Team Salvato, which contains some spoilers as it is difficult to discuss without revealing some surprising elements:

You download and open Doki Doki¹ Literature Club! expecting a cutesy, candy-colored dating simulator. Instead the first thing you see is a disclaimer warning players of intense psychological horror, unsuitable for children or “those who are easily disturbed.”

This is just the first jarring twist you’ll experience while playing this “visual novel” that casts you as a young schoolboy on the morning that his childhood friend, the vivacious Sayori, convinces him to attend a meeting of the school’s new Literature Club. Your character is reluctant to officially join at first, but is quickly swayed after meeting bookish wallflower Yuri, tiny-but-feisty first year Natsuki, and the enigmatic, quietly intimidating Monika — all beautiful, all vying for his attention. As he proceeds to bond with each girl through poetry (an act that has not escaped the increasingly insecure Sayori’s notice), he also picks up on a few odd comments from the girls, especially Monika. But just as things seem to be proceeding in a romantic direction for your character, he makes a horrifying discovery that turns the entire game on its head.

The disclaimer prepared me for a dark turn, so one of my biggest surprises was just how much time the player must invest in the first act, which plays as a low stakes kawaii² love story. Hours of play are spent on poem-building minigames and simple conversations with the other characters in a point-and-click format. It’s not until deep into this storyline that the game twists itself into a tragic, surreal horror narrative that I can best describe as “if David Lynch envisioned Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as an anime-inspired dating sim.” But no amount of intentional “glitches” or meta commentary are as disturbing as the very real psychological terror of our inability to save those we love who suffer from depression despite our best efforts.

DDLC! is not recommended for players under the age of 13, and even for older audiences, content warnings are absolutely essential as its portrayal of suicidal ideation, self-harm, and other consequences of mental illness are uncompromising and potentially triggering. But this is also what makes DDLC! a strong addition to any library collection designed to facilitate conversations around mental health awareness. The reveals hit like an emotional gut punch because of how true to life they are. And the heartbreaking reality is, anyone can suffer, no matter how cheery they seem, and declarations of love are not enough to cure depression. These are hard lessons, but they are valuable. On a more literacy-focused note, the game can also encourage players to peruse the library’s poetry section and even try their own hand at writing, and the story’s unexpected turns into genre subversion and meta-fiction can invite some interesting questions about narrative conventions (and how they can be broken for maximum impact.) For older teens in a supported environment with adults they can trust to moderate these discussions, DDLC! offers a powerful lens for examining storytelling techniques, and for understanding mental health struggles that so many young adults face.

Team Salvato. Doki Doki Literature Club. Steam version, Team Salvato, 2017.

1. an onomatopoeia that evokes the beating of a heart, popular in Japanese media ↩︎
2. a Japanese term applied to cute, precious, and childlike things ↩︎