Spoiler
Warning for Doki-Doki Literature Club
My
personal relationship with horror media is a bit atypical. As a kid I
hated anything scary.
In fact, I remember not being able to walk to a certain part of the
movie theater because a huge poster for “Seed
of Chucky”
was
on display. Somewhere down the line, however, that all changed. I am
still not sure myself as to when this happened, but one day I could
just do horror. I found a group of friends willing to watch anything
scary and make fun of it to lighten the mood, dove heavy into
Wikipedia to research classic horror movies and games that would
become huge formative experiences for me, and treated the horror
genre as just that: a genre of entertainment.
Horror
possess a special quality that most other genres I love do not, which
is to say most things under the tag “horror”
that
I have experienced are, for lack of a better word, bad. Bad moves,
bad games and bad stories make up the bulk of available scary media,
and one needs to dig to find gems. I believe this comes mainly from
of creators not knowing the difference between scaring someone and
making someone feel scared. Namely, scaring someone is just jumping
out from behind a door when they weren't expecting it and making
their heart skip, while calling someone and telling them you saw
something sneak into their house at night is a way to make that
person feel
scared. It is for that reason I want to bring your attention to one
of my favorite video games of 2017, and the catalyst for this
write-up: Doki Doki Literature Club.
DDLC
is a visual novel game that you can download for free. It is also a
special game for a lot of reasons, one of which being that it is the
scariest thing I have subjected myself to in years. The basic premise
of the game involves
playing as a male avatar in an anime setting who joins a literature
club full of four distinct girls who you try to romance via writing
poetry. There's Sayori (red bow), Yuri (long purple hair), Natskuki
(pink hair), and Monika (long brown hair). These girls all have
personalities made up of tried and true anime tropes. Sayori is your
happy-go-lucky childhood friend, Yuri is a quiet and sensible
bookworm, Natsuki shows her affection through aggression while being
a fan of cutesy things, and Monika is the naturally talented and
cheerful president of the club. On the surface it is a cute game
about trying to win the heart of the girl that you like most, not
uncommon to visual novels, and that in itself is the first piece of
what makes the game such a beautifully dark puzzle.
Right when you
start up the game you get a content warning that the game is not made
for kids, which would be one thing if the game had adult content, but
it lists “disturbing
content”
specifically
as the reason young players should avoid the game. After that you
name your character and join the club, meeting the girls and
familiarizing yourself with the only unique gameplay mechanic DDLC
has to offer, writing poems. Every day in the club you get to read
each member’s
poems, ranging from
deeply metaphorical pieces done by Yuri to the simple but effective
work written by Natsuki, syles that you can imitate when it comes to
creating your own pieces. You write poems by picking words off of a
list with 10 words on it, each word corresponding to either Sayori,
Yuri or Natsuki, which you can see as tiny avatars in the corner of
the page. After you have picked 20 words, you get to spend the next
day at school with whomever liked your poem the most, subtly changing
your relationship with the girls after each poem. Some of the words
used for the poem are a bit alarming though, words like “suicide”
and
“depression”
popping
up admist happier words like “candy”
and
“fireworks”,
with dark words resonating well with a girl you may not expect. This
combined with the disclaimer are your only indication that the game
is about something other than cute girls.
Over
the course of your days at school you start to notice that Sayori is
acting weird, keeping quiet instead of being her usual extraverted
self. When you as the player confront her at her house about this, in
a scene which in any other visual novel would be the point where she
confesses her love for you, she instead tells you she is severely
depressed. Her feelings for you play into it though, creating a
jealousy that Sayori doesn't want and thus causing her to try and
pull away from you as a result. We as players learn that all of the
shortcomings usually just attributed to her anime character type are
actually due to her depression. After trying to comfort her and
assuring her that you will be supportive through her darkest times,
you promise to hang out with her at an upcoming school festival (that
the literature club is running an event for) and say goodbye to her,
only for her to see you hanging out with one of the other girls from
the club in your house later that day, troubling her further. The
next day as you head to school you notice Sayori is absent, and a
poem that she wrote for the literature club consists of her writing
the words “get
out of my head”
written
over and over on it. When you decide to go see if your friend is
okay, you find her dead in her room, having hanged herself, and you
receive a screen that just says “END.”
It is here where the game went from making me anxious to creating a
full-blown sense of dread in my stomach, as the game then restarts
from the beginning without Sayori in it, deleting her character file
from your computer’s DDLC game folder, and erasing her existence
within that world.
It
is here in this second run of the game or Act 2 (which could very
well take you 2-3 hours to get to depending on how fast you read and
how engrossed you are in the story) that the disturbing horror rears
its head. The game glitches constantly, the character portraits
distort briefly before they appear on screen, disturbing poems and
images show up in the folder of your game on your computer, and every
single comfort you built up in Act 1 is taken away from you. This is
the genius that is DDLC's understanding of horror;
the scary parts of the game aren't something happening to your
avatar, they are happening to you as someone playing the game. The
innumerable scary details that change throughout Act 2 are never
commented on by the avatar, but each and every single change is
noticed by you, and it feels like the game starts to play you as
opposed to the opposite. This creates an eerie disconnect between
role-playing a character and feeling targeted as a player. Yuri,
Natsuki and Monika all exhibit obsessive and terrifying behavior
(based on who you try to romance in Act 2) that you do not have the
have the ability to comment on as your avatar. You become trapped in
a nightmare in which your only way to meaningfully interact with
these characters is taken away from you, leaving you feeling isolated
playing something that ultimately stops feeling like a video game.
What
makes this feeling of dread all the more tangible, however, was the
act
that preceded it. Act 1 is vital to the overall story, complete with
character arcs, twists and narrative hooks that get you invested in
the characters. Without that comfort that we were able to latch onto,
taking it away wouldn't mean anything. At the same time, however, Act
2 doesn't just come out of nowhere.
There
are hints at the game’s darker nature from moment one and there is
a natural progression and flow into the scariness of the latter half.
Once you find out why the game feels like it is playing you,
everything is re-contextualized, giving the story a sense of cohesion
despite how unsettling it makes you feel. This is something that a
lot of Horror media botches. When creating a setup meant to be the
comfort hook that is established before the “scares”
come
in, most average horror movies and games will create a setting meant
to be the “norm.”
Once
that norm is shattered, it feels like a jarring shift of perspective
rather than one well thought out narrative. The tension that leads to
a scare should be just as well executed as the scare itself. While
Act 1 may not be scary in its own right, it establishes all of the
more twisted characteristics of the girls that become more fleshed
out and menacing in the games second half, and uses the players
knowledge that this may have scary content to lure them into a state
of feeling scared just in time for the game to break.
DDLC
takes a holistic approach to Horror writing.
Every
piece of it exists to eventually make you uneasy, whether you know it
or not, and that is the hallmark of a good story. If the game was
actually just cutesy in its first half, with no hints at all to the
darker nature of what is to come, then it would be a bad game and a
bad story. Sure there would be shock value if all of a sudden Sayori
just hung herself, but I personally would just feel lied to instead
of scared. The clever subversion of not only horror tropes but also
anime and visual novel tropes is what creates such a solid foundation
for unease. You hate seeing horrible things happen to characters you
care about, and at certain points in Act 2 when certain characters
show signs that they too are aware of how horrible their world has
become, it hits home way more than a videogame about hitting on women
should. Shock value has become synonymous with Horror recently,
leading to more and more cases of just throwing scares in as opposed
to working them into a story. While series known for producing shock
value and jump scares are immensely prominent in pop-culture, they
hardly ever prove memorable in comparison to stories that lend
themselves to creating feelings of terror and discomfort. Even in
DDLC itself, the most memorable parts of the game are moments where
the game is doing something small, something only I notice, something
that makes me question why I have subjected myself to such a game. I
engaged with DDLC, I gave it my attention and it rewarded my with a
good story and pure terror, and this is the way any good piece of
horror media should be.
I
have thought about this game every day in the month after I played
it, and have recommended it to literally everyone I know who would
play it. It is rare for something I watch/play to scare me in such a
poignant way. This game takes about 4 hours to beat, but I have spent
10 hours playing it through multiple times, and easily spent another
20 hours watching others playing it, talking about it with friends,
and diving into every secret
hidden within it. I believe that horror has the capacity to be more
engrossing than a lot of people would assume. While being scared out
of your mind may not be fun in the moment, looking back and
questioning how and why something you played gave you that feeling is
compelling and leaves you looking for the next piece of media that
will affect you. This game absorbed me into its world and part of me
still feels like I am there, at the literature club, waiting for the
next well-placed yet terrifying revelation.
