Disintegration in ‘Doki Doki Literature Club’
The adorable dating sim Doki Doki Literature Club might be the perfect embodiment of what we here at Epilogue try to highlight and analyze: video games as art, literature, and a storytelling medium. It’s a game that breaks the mould in surprising ways. It’s a game that shatters genre expectations. More than anything, Doki Doki pushes the boundaries between minimalist game mechanics and complex storytelling. This game exists as evidence of video games thriving as a diverse art form that can tell stories unlike any other kind of media.
As someone who studies English literature, I was both excited and skeptical to play the (free) Steam game, Doki Doki Literature Club. I was excited because very few games have explicit literary themes, something I’ve tried to wedge into discussion of ludonarratives. I was skeptical because it’s hard to imagine a literature club being much of a “game.” I was happily mistaken on both accounts.
It’s impossible to understand the nature of Doki Doki on the surface level alone. When you first sit down to play, you may be charmed by the cheery, upbeat music that pulses throughout the story. The anime overtones might be welcome, especially for those who are familiar with the trope of high school settings in anime. And the ‘dating sim’ nature of the game’s structure becomes clear almost immediately. It reminds me of Persona without the RPG elements of battle. But even this comparison is too simple.
Some have described Doki Doki as a visual novel, others as a romance game, others as psychological horror. Mechanically, the game is simple; the only user interface is to click through the game’s dialogue as the story unfolds. But this story becomes remarkable the more you play through it, the more you unfold the layers within.
The game begins with you, the protagonist, a young man who is asked by his childhood friend Sayori to join her high school literature club. Sayori brings you along to meet the three other members: Natsuki, Yuri, and Monika, the club’s president. You feel out of place as the only guy in a club with three intelligent and attractive women. Furthermore, literature is not your domain of expertise. You’re just here to support your friend Sayori.
The club begins to meet, welcoming you with each passing week. You begin participating in poetry reading and writing, where the club becomes a kind of writing workshop. Until this point, the story has progressed without much mechanical engagement on your part; you just have to keep clicking through the dialogue as the narrative develops. In these poetry sessions, however, a new mechanic is introduced: poetry writing.
Poetry writing might not sound like a riveting and inventive game mechanic. It would be difficult to argue that this game innovates on that basis alone. The break from simple clicking and reading, however, is welcome. You, the new guy in the club, have to write a poem to share with the club’s members. During these poetry writing moments, you are presented with a word bank of ten words per page, with twenty pages to complete. Each word you choose makes one of the four girls happy – excluding Monika – and therefore like you more. The player, for the first time, is given agency by the game.
You get to choose the club member that you want to seduce based on your poetic decisions. Sayori, your childhood friend, swoons when you choose melancholic, nostalgic, or romantic words tinged with sadness. Apparently she’s lost in the past, heart caught up on a certain someone… Natsuki, the pink-haired, sassy club member, can have her heartstrings pulled if you choose cute, adorable, lovey words. This is reflected by her own poetry, a pattern which you can pick up if you pay attention to her poems. Yuri, the final club member, prefers a darker sort of poem, with words that draw on philosophical concepts like existentialism, cosmology, and other things that most people might call “too deep.”
If you strategize in these poem-writing scenarios, then the girl of choice will begin to express romantic sentiments towards your character. Putting aside the potential socially awkward dimension of romantically pursuing an anime character, you are probably going to have a preference for who your character ends up with. The four girls’ personalities are all different, as evidenced by the words they prefer in poetry. I picked Yuri, and wrote poems that mostly grabbed her attention. You get a sense that you’re on the right path when the girl of your choice likes your own choices.
This game is still cute, right?
After a few of these poetry sessions, you’ve successfully made one of the club members fall in love with you. Success! And so the game moves on until the club has to prepare for a school festival. While walking her home, Sayori confesses to you that she’s been morbidly depressed, that this whole exercise of inviting you to join the club wasn’t about the club or the membership, but about you. “Why won’t the rainclouds go away?” she asks. She tells you she’s been in love with you this whole time. And that might take you aback as a player, especially if you’ve been writing poetry for one of the other club members, pursuing them.
You then have a choice as a player: tell Sayori that you love her too, or condemn her to the friend zone.
Sayori presents her next poem that reads an incessant “Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head.” All the way down the page. This is another morbid, unwelcome sign of where this otherwise cute game is heading.
If you, like me, chose to reinforce your choice of another girl and thereby condemn Sayori to the friend zone, so to speak, then you’ll reach the game’s first ending. You text Sayori, checking in on her to make sure she’s okay, wondering where she was at the club and why her poem was so dark.
Sayori doesn’t reply, and so you decide to pay her a visit at home to cheer her up. After all, she’s your childhood friend. Immediately upon entering her room, you encounter Sayori, who has hanged herself.
Stunned and bewildered by this immediate and bizarre shift in plot and mood, you can’t help but immediately become ripped apart by guilt: you could have stopped this. Staring in disbelief at her limp body and contorted face, the game begins to glitch; the images warp, the perspective sharpens and blurs, and the music cuts in an uncomfortable, diminished way. The game abruptly ends and you are thrown back to the main menu. It looks like you’ve lost.
My heartbeat was still racing as I decided to try this game again, and go for Sayori instead of Yuri, hoping to prevent her impending suicide.
The game begins just as it did before, cheery music and all. This time, however, you go straight to the literature club instead of having Sayori introduce you. That’s odd, you might think. And then you enter the club to greet only three members: Yuri, Natsuki and Monika. Monika greets you as if for the first time, as if Sayori had never existed. (Had she?)
If you’re intrigued, as I was, and willing to pursue this game a bit further, then you’ll notice new features of the game: massive glitch patches. The game has apparently deleted Sayori, which has corrupted the game Doki Doki itself. Your save files have disappeared, and in their place has arisen oddities that can’t be explained by logic alone.
The club members act just a bit different, but still somehow no one notices Sayori’s obvious absence. As a player, you can’t help but become worried by the ever-increasing glitch elements that the game is allowing you to continue playing through.
Without Sayori to choose from, I decided to pursue Yuri once more to see what would happen. Would it work this time? Pretty soon into playing this second round of Doki Doki, you’re encountered with yet another violent and disturbing scene. You find Yuri in a mentally dark place, cutting herself. As you try to console her, Yuri’s character refuses help and kindness, rather redirecting everything positive at the club’s president, Monika. Another oddity. You might wonder if this is a part of the glitches.
In this second playthrough, the festival once again looms on the horizon. This time, it’s Yuri that brings in the disturbing poem to the literature club. Unlike Sayori’s “Get out of my head” poem, Yuri’s consists of scribbled, illegible writing that looks half-drunk, or at least deranged.
Her poem’s page is marked with blood stains and some unidentifiable yellow substance smeared across it. This warns you pretty quickly that you might have another suicide on your hands. But, at this point, agency is stripped from the player. The game takes its course as you helplessly click through.
Yuri’s descent begins with a confession of her love to you, almost exactly as Sayori did. Only this time, there is no choice between rejection and reciprocation. You just passively receive her unfiltered emotions. Helplessly, you watch Yuri stab herself to death, right in front of you. Your character can’t comprehend this; it’s unclear whether your character realizes these two deaths, these two save files, these two timelines. Even still, Monday rolls around, ready for another meeting of the literature club.
On Monday, Natsuki is the first one to attend. And you’re still sitting there, covered in Yuri’s blood, holding her corpse. Natsuki begins to greet you, but notices Yuri’s corpse, causing her to vomit uncontrollably. Again, as if it weren’t clear, we are not playing the same cute, pretty dating sim that we set off with. After this gross display of vomit, Natsuki flees in disgust and terror. (Alternately, her neck snaps at once, turning a violent 90 degrees.)
Then, almost predictably, Monika appears. She seems completely unphased by her dead friend, the puddles of blood and vomit. Rather, she apologizes to you for the mess, for the inconvenience. As if she were a custodian going to mop up the mess, she goes into the game itself and deletes the characters’ files for the remaining two members. The game restarts.
Here is the beauty of this game, and where all of the ludonarrative implications become ripe with intrigue, innovation, and complication. At this point, there are two ways that the game can unfold: you can restart the game entirely, downloading Doki Doki afresh, or you can continue. Either way leads two a one-on-one situation with Monika, in which you are stuck in a dialogue with her.
There is no option for a third playthrough as you have the game installed now. Rather, Monika has broken the game’s code so much that the entire universe outside of the game’s classroom breaks apart into corrupted code and chaos. Most of the text is unreadable, the scenes are no longer linear.
You find yourself looking deep into Monika’s sadistically loving eyes. She sighs with contentment, glad to finally have you all to herself, even in this hellscape. Behind her, outside of the windows, a broken and burning universe floats by. Empty space and silence envelop the scene. You are trapped with Monika forever.
I might be wrong about “forever,” but I kept prompting her dialogue for at least four hours over the course of a few sit downs. Even that wasn’t enough to end the game. Presumably, I thought, the game disintegrates into oblivion. I quit the game before I realized that the developers intended for this one-on-one exchange with Monika to extend indefinitely.
She tells you how much she’s wanted you since the game’s beginning. She confesses to messing with the game’s code to cause depression in Sayori, amplifying Yuri’s personality such that she spiraled into suicidal tendencies over you. In sum, Monika concludes, all of these efforts were to try and simply distract you from the other members, make them less attractive and likeable.
Monika’s dialogue soon begins to address you: not “you” the character, but “you” the player. Monika outright breaks the fourth wall in this scene. It’s at this point that you might realize that sitting here and talking to her isn’t going anywhere. In a moment of unorthodox ludonarrative, you have to minimize the game and go into its directory.
In the game’s directory, you find Monika’s character file and delete it. This glitches out the already broken apart game.
Monika is enraged, but forgives you, and then eventually restores the club members’ character files to the game, deleting her own.
If you are persistent enough to have made it this far, a final playthrough is in order. This playthrough begins as the very first playthrough did, only Sayori is now club president. When entering the literature club, the three members Sayori, Natsuki, and Yuri thank you for deleting Monika. Sayori, now president, tells you that she knows everything that has transpired in your playthrough, and that this time you’ll be together forever.
Sayori bids you farewell, thanks you for playing Doki Doki, and then the credits – or, what looks like credits – begin to roll. The screen glitches one last time, and Monika’s voice is heard for the first time. Somehow she’s still embedded somewhere in the game. Monika, having you as her only audience, sings on top of the cheerful music from the game’s beginning. Apparently it’s a song she wrote on the piano for you, called “Your Reality” – a fitting title, to be sure, as this whole game is a barrage of confusion about reality itself. Monika’s final note appears:
The key here is that, in this game’s world, “There is no happiness.” And to demonstrate that aspect of this game, you soon realize that the game is, in fact, truly deleted. Doki Doki must be reinstalled.
(Cleverly, the player can delete Monika’s file before beginning the game, which will cause a ripple effect on how the game unfolds. Try this out for an equally bizarre, but quick ending.)
Other, more completionist types will experience something a bit different from this game’s disintegration and eventual deletion. If you play through every possible scene within the scope of one playthrough, an alternate scene is presented. (The careful player will take Monika’s advice from the game’s beginning with deadly seriousness: make sure to save so you can go back before Monika starts messing with the game’s code.) You’d have to keep opening up your initial save file and play up until the point before Sayori hangs herself.
If you pursue this completionist route, Sayori will behave differently by the game’s end. She thanks you for all that you’ve done for the literature club, for her friendship with you and with the club’s members. She bids farewell to you with love from all the club’s members. And the credits begin again.
An interesting mechanical difference between the aforementioned broken playthrough and this completionist playthrough is the way the credits roll. Not only do they not disintegrate and delete the entire game, but they flesh out the credits with images from each character that are omitted if you play it incompletely. In this completionist playthrough, the credits resolve with a note from Dan Salvato, creator of Doki Doki. This ‘thank you’ note at the game’s completed ending perhaps sums up our project at Epilogue with incredible alacrity.
Doki Doki Literature Club is radical in almost every way once you’ve spent time beneath its charming and deceptive facade. Not only does this game become an object of itself, it becomes a metatext. A metatext is a kind of literature that maintains two levels of analysis at once: the one given to you, and the one that reflects on itself. Considering video games as literature, this game is a meta-game. Seldom do video games call on the player to manually alter files for plot progression. Seldom do romance games end in depression, suicide, and snapped necks.
Dan Salvato’s marketing for this game is another layer of ludonarrative genius. Monika, in the final infinite one-on-one scene, tells you that you should follow her on Twitter (which you can: @lilmonix3). This Twitter page is actually updated as if Monika herself was tweeting, still out there somewhere in the game’s code. Another aspect of Salvato’s marketing comes from his own Twitter page. On Halloween of 2017, for instance, he tweeted out:
In some real sense, Doki Doki must be experienced by an unexpecting, naive player. No amount of summary or analysis is enough to demonstrate just how ridiculous and profound this game ends up becoming. Salvato has created a contemporary masterpiece that is bound to inspire generations of pioneers in other genres. This game is not only art, but it’s literature. Doki Doki is a love letter to ludonarrative.
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