DISCLAIMER: Like Doki Doki Literature Club!, this article will deal with disturbing and upsetting themes some may not be comfortable with. If you are easily upset or triggered by certain distressing topics, this article may not be for you.
Way back in 2017, the internet was coming off the back of a few different popular games that had been released during the 2010s. With Undertale in 2015 and Pony Island the following year, there had been a huge increase in interest when it came to the style they were known for. Games were no longer simple self-contained stories with run-of-the-mill plots and traditional characters. It was becoming clear that they could be so much more, and the seemingly-impenetrable fourth wall that had stood the test of time was beginning to crack. Then came Team Salvato and their instant hit, Doki Doki Literature Club!, the next viral sensation to sweep through the ranks of the online world. Styled as a simple dating simulator, the game would prove to have much darker secrets lurking beneath its bright pink surface and characters who subvert expectations in the most terrifying of ways. Doki Doki Literature Club! was so popular, in fact, that Team Salvato rereleased it only a month ago on June 30th 2021 with additional content and new secrets to uncover. But with the original game almost completely untouched, it stood as a harsh reminder of just how bleak it could be.
An Unbreakable Bond
The game begins by introducing both the main character-who ends up having the personality of a cardboard box for the most part-and Sayori, his childhood friend who walks to school with him. The player views the events of the game unfold through the eyes of the main character, or the MC as he has been dubbed, and they will also incidentally name him before the game begins. The first few hours of the game unfold predictably, with the MC being dragged to the literature club after school by Sayori and encouraged by its other three members to get to know them and make himself comfortable. After agreeing to join, it is up to the player to woo the girl they like the most by writing a poem for them after each school day, accomplished through a minigame where twenty different words are chosen and each word will gain a certain amount of affection from a different girl. The club’s president, Monika, is not a romantic option right from the outset.
While the player can choose to appeal to Sayori, the real drama is clearer should they gravitate towards one of the others. Yuri, the quiet and bookish girl with long purple hair, will sit and read with the MC during their time together, introducing him to her book, The Portrait of Markov. Natsuki, on the other hand, is boisterous and loudmouthed, with a manga collection she is eager to show to the MC. As a result of him spending time with the other girls, Sayori appears to become jealous as the week goes on. She will ask the MC if he would walk home with one of the other girls were the opportunity to arise, or if he would still walk home with Sayori as he had always done. She will also make off-handed comments about how the poems he brings to the club seem to have been written with someone else in mind. While it is established from the very beginning that Sayori is the MC’s childhood friend, the game makes it obvious that her feelings are not quite so simple anymore and she may be developing a romantic attraction to him. The bond the two share is a strong one, and it bleeds through to the player, making them care very much for the timid and good-hearted Sayori. But, as will become common practice with this game, this is done intentionally.
The Void
The first time the game sheds its brightly-coloured skin and shows us a different side to it is when Sayori goes home early one day from the club, something clearly bothering her. While everything up to this point has been predictable and straightforward, there is something evidently off about Sayori’s manner. No longer is she simply envious of the other girls getting the attention. It seems there is another issue bubbling up from beneath the surface. The MC decides to pay her a visit and try to understand what is going on. It is here that she reveals how she has suffered with depression her whole life, so severe, in fact, that she can rarely find a reason to get up in the mornings. While an off-the-cuff comment at the beginning of the game chalked Sayori’s lateness down to her laziness and general slobbery, the game twists that around and roots it in a very real issue, forcing players to see that they cannot always tell what is going on in someone’s mind. Where the MC is initially critical and judgemental of Sayori for delaying him in the morning, he is confronted with the frightening reality that this way of thinking was presumptuous and insensitive. The entire scene is such a stark contrast to what the rest of the game has been up to this point.
Doki Doki Literature Club! does offer a disclaimer at the beginning to say the experience would not be for those who are easily disturbed or upset by themes of suicide and depression, but it is not unthinkable that many went into the game assuming it would be a regular dating simulator, only to be met with this very poignant moment mixed in with the rest of the juvenile romance. After the moment passes, Doki Doki Literature Club! resumes its overly cutesy façade and the MC returns to spending time with whichever girl most took his fancy. Players might assume the conversation with Sayori would be the only reason for the disclaimer at the start and the rest of the game would play out rather conventionally. They would be wrong. The madness, it would appear, was only just beginning.
Heartbreak
The tone of the game dramatically shifts the day after Sayori confronts the MC, and he is forced to decide whether to remain Sayori’s friend or to express his love and enter into a relationship with her. The choice has no effect on the overall story. He walks to school alone, deciding not to disturb Sayori, but the music is suddenly absent and the player sits through several minutes of total and utter silence. It’s incredibly eerie, as is the poem the MC discovers upon arriving at the school; the phrase “get out of my head” repeated over and over on a piece of paper. He hurries out of the school, called after by a much-too-chipper Monika, and rushes home to discover Sayori in her room, hanging. The first few hours of the game spent emotionally bonding the player to this fictional character all shatter into pieces as the heart wrenching story about her struggle with depression comes to the most tragic of conclusions.
The first time I played Doki Doki Literature Club!, this scene ruined me and I spent several minutes crying my eyes out. The fact that a game could so effortlessly make me care for a fictional character-what’s more, a fictional character with no voice acting or animation-and then instantly tear that character away from me was astounding. But it worked like a charm and I was invested in the story with no closure to speak of by what the game makes you believe is the ending. But upon returning to the title menu, something is noticeably different. Sayori’s character on the screen is gone, now replaced by a horrific, glitchy amalgamation of the other three girls. As I said, this was merely the beginning.
Just Monika
With any previous saves now gone, the player is forced to click on the gibberish text now replacing the “New Game” option and see what happens. The game starts up again like before, but the text and dialogue are now completely broken and the music is off-key. It’s surreal, to say the least. While the game tries to introduce Sayori, she is represented by that terrifying amalgamation from the title screen for a matter of seconds before the game appears to reset itself and continue as if she never existed. The MC mentions how he has always walked to school alone and how he is unsure what club to join, where before Sayori walked with him and was enthusiastically encouraging him to accompany her to the literature club. It is worth noting that the MC no longer reacts accordingly to the events around him, refusing to comment on several instances of glitched textures and jumpscares that become commonplace for the rest of the game. He behaves much like a video game character whose AI has not been scripted to acknowledge these things and the player begins to feel incredibly alone, no longer comforted by the fact that they would be experiencing the game alongside the MC. From hereon out, it is very much the player setting foot in the literature club and seeing what horrors it has to offer.
While the structure remains largely the same, it is the strange occurrences and behaviour of the girls that stand out at this point. Yuri begins to act obsessively and makes some very disturbing comments about her infatuation with the player, while Natsuki lets slip that her father physically abuses her. Monika, on the other hand, continues to behave perfectly normally, but in this new virtual hellscape that is most concerning of all. Taking a step back, there is an unusual piece of text that appears on the screen during the sequence where we see Sayori hanging in her room at the end of Act 1. It reads, “An exception has occurred(…)See traceback.txt for details.” While the rerelease, Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!, utilises a virtual desktop in-game to allow the player to launch the vanilla game, view unlockables, and browse the folders and files, the original game saw players opening the local files on their PCs to discover the truth of what was going on. After opening “traceback.txt”, a couple of lines read, “Oh jeez...I didn't break anything, did I? Hold on a sec, I can probably fix this...I think...Actually, you know what? This would probably be a lot easier if I just deleted her. She's the one who's making this so difficult. Ahaha! Well, here goes nothing.” But that’s not all. There is also a folder in the game files labelled “characters” which, once opened, would show all four of the literature club’s girls. Now, though, Sayori is absent. It’s easy to miss the line of text during Sayori’s hanging scene-I was certainly much too distracted to pay attention to it- but it points players towards this revelation that she didn’t only commit suicide. She was outright deleted from the game, causing the resulting glitches to occur due to the game being forced to start without a central character. The fourth wall has well and truly been demolished.
The game continues and it becomes clear that the one manipulating the events of the game and the one responsible for Sayori’s fate is Monika. Having become self-aware, Monika became enamoured with the player and began altering the personalities of the other girls to make them unlikable, hoping the game would then make her available as a romantic option. She made Sayori’s depression skyrocket, causing her to take her own life. She made the quiet and shy Yuri go from a tad intense to completely obsessive and self-harming. And Natsuki, while largely unchanged in Act 2 aside from her forthcomingness about her abuse, is the only one who starts to suspect something is up with Monika, only to have her mind wiped, for lack of a better word, and find herself forced to lie to the player about how everything is fine and her suspicions were unfounded. After Yuri becomes unhinged and her unstable emotions can contain themselves no longer, she stabs herself in front of the MC and Monika is forced to delete her and Natsuki, as her plan did not quite go the way she was hoping. This makes way for Act 3, where Monika and the MC are alone at last and she confesses that she is aware she exists inside of a video game.
Though the player is technically still viewing the world through the MC’s eyes, he has been almost totally unreactive to the events of the game since Sayori’s death and Monika herself even dismisses him as a mere thing used by the game as an avatar for the player. But it is the person behind the screen that she is in love with and they are the reason she did what she did, having become so lost and alone during her time in this virtual world. She explains how maddening it has been to exist alongside fictional characters while being the only one who is truly self-aware, a proper artificial intelligence. It’s ironic, in a way, how Monika’s fate mirrors Sayori’s. Both found themselves feeling isolated, alone, with no escape from the impending darkness. And both desired the affection of another who seemed content to offer it to someone else instead. And yet, Monika was quick to cast her friends aside and try to take what she wanted by force. In the end, her actions cost her the one chance at happiness she had and the player ends up deleting her character file, ending her reign of terror. Initially spiteful and hurt, Monika does see the way she has acted has been despicable and during her death throes she restores the original game, minus herself.
Your Reality
Act 4 begins like Act 1, with the MC and Sayori walking to school together and discussing the literature club, but there are some noticeable differences. First and foremost, the game’s expository text at the bottom of the screen makes a point of explaining that Sayori has been getting up on time and is always in the best of moods, her depression seemingly not as much of an issue for her anymore. While it will never truly be gone, it is a nice turn of events to be reunited with her and see that she is managing quite well. Additionally, with Monika allegedly gone, Sayori is now the president of the literature club. But this proves to be the game’s undoing. After being introduced to Yuri and Natsuki, Sayori reveals to the player that she has become self-aware, presumably because she now fills the role of president. But she is also plagued with the same dangerous infatuation as Monika and she attempts to take the player for herself. Monika, having repented for her crimes, reaches out from the beyond and decides to delete the game entirely, stating that no happiness can be found there after all. She sings a song over the credits-voiced by Jillian Ashcraft-and leaves the player with one final message, reiterating that the literature club is a bleak place where no joy can be found.
But there is another ending that can be achieved, should the player decide to appeal to all three girls during Act 1. Through a series of saving and reloading, the player must write a poem every day for the same girl before reloading and repeating the process two more times for the remaining literature club members. Having done this, Sayori does not try to steal the player away for herself and express her love for them. She instead thanks them for trying to make all of the girls happy as that is all she ever wanted. There is a poignancy here that is missing from the regular ending, a fact only reinforced by the bittersweet farewell shared with Sayori as the game begins to close and she urges the player to “come visit sometime, okay?” Furthermore, the final message is no longer written by Monika to express her resentment towards the literature club, but it has been penned by Dan Salvato himself, the game’s creator and sole member of Team Salvato before the release of Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!
The message mainly expresses thanks to the player for taking the time to experience the game, but there are some notable mentions of the type of player who would normally play the kind of dating simulator Doki Doki Literature Club! appeared to be at first glance. Instead of stooping to ridicule or satire, Dan Salvato offers some emotional words of comfort as he hopes the experience has been something of a refuge for those who may not have been lucky enough to find one in the real world. Loneliness has been a constant theme throughout the game, and it seems the game’s creator is well aware of how many people may have related to that. While the reality may be that Doki Doki Literature Club! excels like no other game at exploiting the player’s loneliness and pouring salt in the wound by taking away the characters they so easily become attached to, the second ending attempts to repair some of the damage and offer closure for the events that have transpired. It is not lost on Dan Salvato that his visual novel has likely had players from all walks of life, whether they be a victim of loneliness in need of comfort or perhaps in a position where they find themselves battling with their own inner demons like Sayori. The literature club may not have been a place of happiness for Monika, but it can be for the player and, after everything that transpires, it hopes to be a place of safety for those who have nowhere else to go.
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