For this week’s critical play, I play Doki Doki Literature Club. A game by Team Salvato which can be played on a computer (I played on my Mac). At first glance, Doki Doki Literature Club looks like a lighthearted dating simulator for teen audiences. You play as a high school boy who joins a poetry club full of girls who each want your attention. Everything about the interface, from the pastel colors to the bubbly music, signals a cheerful, romantic experience. But after playing for just a couple hours, it becomes clear that the game is hiding something deeply unsettling. The question is, does that twist support a feminist reading, or does it just reinforce old problems in new packaging?
Shira Chess’s Play Like a Feminist asks us to consider not just who plays, but how games support or resist harmful patterns. In her view, playing like a feminist means asking who gets to speak, who gets hidden, and whose pleasure the game centers. Applying that lens to this game helped me see that while Doki Doki Literature Club wants to be critical, it struggles to escape the logic it claims to challenge.
The game opens with your character entering a literature club (hence the name) led by four girls: Sayori, Natsuki, Yuri, and Monika. Each one fits a clear personality mold. You write poems that appeal to each girl’s taste, gradually building a connection with one of them. This system reinforces the idea that affection is something to be earned through the right choices. Each girl exists to react to you, not to develop on her own terms.
This framework is very limited. The game relies on the illusion of choice while giving you almost no power to shape who your character is or how the girls grow. As Chess argues, many games still position women as objects to be collected or managed. Even when wrapped in poetic dialogue, this pattern still holds.
Around the halfway point, everything shifts. Glitches begin to appear. Characters behave strangely. Sayori reveals she has been struggling with depression, and shortly after, takes her own life. The game then resets, deleting her entirely. Later, Yuri becomes obsessed, and Monika confesses that she has been tampering with the game’s code to make the others less appealing so you would choose her instead.
On paper, Monika’s actions might seem like empowerment. She breaks free from her role, speaks directly to the player, and tries to control her fate. But her rise to awareness comes at the cost of erasing the others. Yuri and Sayori are reduced to disturbing plot devices. Their mental health is not explored with care, but used for shock value. Monika’s control is framed as obsessive and dangerous. In the end, you are forced to delete her to return the game to normal.
This resolution feels hollow. If anything, it punishes the one character who becomes self-aware. Monika may gain control of the code, but she still revolves around the player. Her big move is not to liberate herself but to beg for your attention.
As a player interested in narrative and systems, I wanted more moments where the mechanics supported growth or solidarity. Instead, each girl is isolated and eventually removed. There is no community in the literature club. Only collapse.
One moment that stood out to me was when Monika looks at you and says, “I’ve been watching you play through this game. And now you’re finally here.” It could have been a turning point. She could have taken this space and reshaped it for everyone. Instead, the moment becomes another quiet demand for attention. It reflects the game’s broader issue. It gives the appearance of rebellion without fully committing to change.
Doki Doki Literature Club wants to shock its players, and in that, it succeeds. But playing it as a feminist reveals how deeply it still relies on and is built upon the same structures it claims to critique. The women in the game are not liberated. They are rewritten, corrupted, or deleted. Monika is not allowed to lead. She is forced to beg and then vanish.
Shira Chess argues that feminist play asks us to imagine better. In this case, that might look like a game where every member of the literature club gets to write their own ending. A game where emotion is not treated as instability. A game where choice means more than picking who to pursue. Doki Doki Literature Club could have been that game, but it wasn’t unfortunately.
