Doki Doki Literature Club
I saw quite a number of people talk and play this game, and saying it has "fucked them up" which is interesting. This is portrayed as a typical dating visual novel game with the cute anime girls that have the usual tropes. Doki Doki Literature Club is about a guy who joins his school's literature club. The members in this club are all girls and you try to make one of them fall for you. This game is free but it is well done for a free game. You can probably finish this in like 5 hours. The game does warn you there will be disturbing imagery so this is a psychological horror game. I do recommend this game! For a game thats made with renpy, I am impressed. The rest of this post will be spoilers though.
So this game will take a few in game days as a typical school visual novel game. This may take a couple hours for reading before anything interesting happens. Each day you write a poem that you will share with the other members the next day. The poem is how you trigger which of the girl's route you will end up taking so how its written is important if you are going for a certain girl.
This game is like Nier where it takes a few playthroughs to get the full story. The first playthrough is the longest, and it gets shorter from there. While it does take awhile to for anything to happen, I do think its important to try to will yourself to keep interest. The second half will be a crazy ride and this long beginning helps balance that out. Not to say the beginning half is boring, but it may not be everyone's taste and it is like a cookie cutout of typical basic visual novel games. Sayori is the chilhood friend who is an airhead, Yuri is the like the intellect quiet type, Natsuki is the petite tsundere girl, and Monika is the usual good at everything girl and is the president of the club.
Now I will spoil the game so don't read beyond this if you don't want to be spoiled!!! This game is super creepy and does make me feel super uncomfortable. It did get me at the end of the first playhrough when it reveals Sayori hanged herself. The creepy art for the other girls didn't get me as much. There are three girls you can pursue and get CG art of during their route: Sayori, Yuri, and Natsuki. You get these in the first playthrough. The second and third will mostly remain the same no matter who you went for in the first playthrough. So if you think going for a different girl will make the second playthrough different, it won't. Natsuki does have a scene if you went for her in the first playthrough. That scene did freak me out, but I do still wish there was more. I did like how well done the second and third playthrough how corrupted the game gets from all the changes thats been made. Also it was neat how the game makes creepy files in the game directory folder. I thought renpy seemed like a limited engine, but after this game I can see that that's not the case at all. If you start the game with Monika's character file deleted, Sayori will popup immediately and become self aware then the game ends. The second playthrough has Monika force you to sit and talk with her. There is a huge amount of dialogue you can go through in this part, and its all rather interesting. She even has a number of dialogue for when you quit and start the game again. I hear she even notices if you are recording gameplay. The third playthrough is the final one and its short. There are two different endings and one is the good ending. The regular ending is like a bad end. You will have to save and load in the first playthrough and get through all the possible girl routes before the hanging scene. This way the good ending should trigger in the third playthrough ending.
While there are a few games that has done similar to what this game did, it still did it well and was enjoyable. Play it yourself or what a playthrough of it!
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