Overall it’s a fairly generic visual novel with a few little twists that keep its early portions engaging, but the disarming cutesiness of the first half hour of gameplay is marred by a growing sense of dread after the content warning that shows on the game’s loading screen. Parts of the game consist of a cute and original minigame where you choose words for poems to appeal to particular girls. The initial portion of the game consists of competent dating sim set in the newly founded literature club in a Japanese high school and the characters are tropey but likeable. What if, Doki Doki Literature Club asks, a digital character whose personality is built entirely around falling in love with the player gained self-awareness? *Spoiler warning from this point on, and the same content warnings given by the game’s store page apply here too*ĭoki Doki Literature Club is a near-perfect blend of compelling psychological horror and genre-deconstructing metanarrative predicated on a critique of the conventions of the genre, and coming in with an understanding of those tropes and conventions will enhance your experience greatly. The game is free on both Steam and Itch.io so there’s really no reason not to check it out! Any explanation of what makes Doki Doki Literature Club the masterpiece it is would actively detract from the experience, so go play it first and come back when you’re done. Usually, I’d try to use an article like this to try to convince you why you should play the game in question, but I really can’t do that here. I first picked the game up on a whim the day it was released, with no context for what it was beyond what the steam store page and genre tags told me, and I’ve not been able to get it off my mind since. It’s been a few months now since Doki Doki Literature Club launched, a relative eternity in the rapidly-shifting nightmare-scape that is games journalism, and it’s taken just as long for me to get my thoughts in order to finish this article, despite the game’s modest 2-3 hour runtime.
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