Critical Play 8: Doki Doki Literature Club

I tried really hard to get into this game, but the terribly dry dialogue made clicking through the game almost physically painful to endure. After playing for nearly an hour and half (even knowing some of the interesting and meta aspects of the game to follow) I ultimately decided to turn away from this game–unable to get through to the more interesting parts of this game.

Doki Doki Literature Club starts off as a typical dating simulator with four “attractive” girls who each are trying to earn your affection.

I’m not sure if it’s because I am gay, but I found the story line extremely dull, and the characters completely disinteresting and unworthy of my time. Some key flaws that I found while playing were the lack of decision making and agency provided to players throughout the story. The first decision wasn’t presented until almost 30 minutes into the game, at which point I was already unimpressed with the dialogue and sick of reading the word “club” for the 1000th time. The mechanics of this game are extremely sparse (making the experience feel very unidirectional) and while this would be possible with a compelling narrative, the dialogue fell flat and made the game feel quite empty. I imagine that narrative was the primary type of fun to be had in this game, but the storyline did not carry this game.

One thing that was interesting about the design of this game was the contrast between luring players in with a traditional dating simulation style, but then throwing the twist of gore and horror to poke fun at the genre and even more so to flip the script on the target player which I imagine to be a middle-aged,  single, sexually frustrated, heterosexual man. This is the strongest piece of design present in the game, although I think pacing wise the game would have improved from introducing more mechanics earlier on to give the player a sense of control. Additionally the game would have been drastically improved if the dialogue was more diverse and if each day was slightly different from the last. In my experience, talking to static teenage girls about the same terrible poems everyday was not enough to keep me engaged to get to the meat of the story. 

Overall I would not recommend this game. I had a hard time staying focused and reading through the piles of dialogue in a story that I found uninteresting. I realize that I am definitely outside of the target audience (as a young gay man), so maybe I will refine this final statement to say if you are gay and young you might not like this game. Overall I will not be finishing Doki Doki Literature Club.



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heyyyyy! I am a mechanical engineering major but I identify as a designer! Excited to meet you all.

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