It uses disturbing subject matter around mental health and uncomfortable scenarios with the four girls to further its story. However, by the end of the game I came to realise that Doki Doki was never intended to be a story about mental health. The first half of Doki Doki had me raising an eyebrow at the game’s questionable depictions of serious mental health issues, as well as the voyeuristic representations of its four characters.
#Doki doki literature club the normal vn free#
This makes it hard for me to recommend Doki Doki to people that aren’t already fans of the genre, especially when the base game is free on Steam.Īfter a while things take a sinister turn and Doki Doki slowly descends down a hellish fever dream. The girls suggest writing poetry as a club activity and this leads to the one of the only forms of interactivity in the game.Īside from making a few choices elsewhere in the game and solving one very light puzzle, most of your playtime consists of just pressing A to read through dialogue. There’s some unspoken tension at the arrival of a new member since it seems all the girls want some of your attention, but everything is presented in a light-hearted, friendly manner. So, you reluctantly join and everything is pretty innocent. Your childhood friend, Sayori, pressures you into joining the newly formed Literature Club with three other girls. This character is really just supposed to be a stand-in for you. You play as an average schoolboy who is into anime and video games and isn’t really interested in anything else. It is definitely a narrative you would not be able to reproduce outside of gaming. It uses its medium to mess with the player and tell its story in a similar way to Nier: Automata or MGS2. And it’s a story that can only be told in the format of a video game. Doki Doki Literature Club is a wild, subversive, smart horror game masquerading as a cute dating sim.