A Proper Approach to Horror

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.