Doki Doki Literature Club is an uncontrollably horrific visual novel
▻https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/22/16512204/doki-doki-literature-club-pc-explained
Although it looks like a dating sim, Doki Doki Literature Club is a free-to-play, psychological horror game, produced by indie studio Team Salvato. Since its release, the game has earned a reputation as an innovative scare. It’s a slow burn that begins with you and group of cute girls who must prove that their literature club is worth becoming an official school organization. Of course, your protagonist is hoping to forge new bonds with some of them along the way. The game encourages you to pick a girl to write a poem for, and depending on your choices, you may draw closer to the club’s charming, sweet members.
A typical scene from early on in Doki Doki Literature Club. Team Salvato
Eventually, true to the game’s advertised content warnings (which you should take seriously, by the way), Doki Doki Literature Club leads you down a dark path, leading to the shocking and emotional death of one character. But in the same moment that it rips your heart open, the game instantly takes a much more unusual twist.
After this initial playthrough ends and the main menu restarts, the dead character’s image is pixelated and warped, as if her death affected the game client itself. The save files become inaccessible, forcing the player into a new game. If and when the player moves ahead to begin this new file, the game seems to react at any hint of this former character, and the client loudly glitches and morphs until it seems satisfied with its outcome.
Soon into the next run-through, the client repeatedly takes control of itself, speeding through text and tacking on unusual images to create grotesque jump scares. But the reality of a sentient game client becomes nightmare fuel on its own.
To make matters worse, in the moment of the character’s death, keen eyes will notice that the game directs the player outside of the client by naming a specific game file, alluding to an outside force changing the game’s universe. It becomes a terrifying mystery, weaving in and out between the in-game plot and the game files’ cryptic implications: What happened to Doki Doki Literature Club?
As I crawled into this “second run,” I wasn’t just horrified; I was mentally trapped in the game’s world and its antics. But I still wanted to dive back in, and I spent time with myself to understand what I had to overcome in order to continue the game. In the process, I realized how Doki Doki Literature Club utilizes an underrated aspect of the horror experience: control, or the lack thereof.
On a basic level, the fear of fear (the anticipation, in a word) is what makes horror as a genre so difficult for many people. In interactive media, you’re especially aware of how you’re prompting the horrors by progressing through the work. Worse, a game can mask the world around you in highly efficient ways, bringing down your guard before a good scare. You can start crawling into a space before getting dragged out, or you can open a door that seemed safe before and encounter a new monster. The point of many games becomes, then, that fear often makes you lose control, and just as often, loss of control makes you lose the game.
