Today's game is the infamous: Doki Doki Literature Club!
WARNING: Spoilers
Created by entirely by Dan Salvato, who described it as a reaction to his love-hate relationship with anime, this game has earned a cult following and reputation for its distinct deconstructionist vibe, since it sets up a standard hentai harem visual novel plot and then systematically dismantles it.
The feeling is very similar to the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, in that it causes you to question the invisible wall between fiction and reality, and reconsider expectations and how they are (or aren't) fulfilled. The main difference, however, is that within a game environment, you are directly connected to the decisions and consequences of the main character, and so your control over the situation (or lack thereof) has a more direct impact on how you relate and react to the story.
So it sets up the story in the standard way: You're (assumably) a standard male high school student with a cute female friend (Sayori) who invites you to join her after-school literature club, which consists of three incredibly cute girls (Yuri, Natsuki and Monika) with standard personalities: genki girl, goth girl, and perfect class leader. By writing "poetry" and sharing it with each member, you shape the plot to determine which girl you will get in the end. Honestly, for the first hour or so I was pretty bored, since you are actually supposed to discuss the poetry with them for what seems like an eternity of fluffy conversations.
But then, of course, things start to unravel a bit.
First, you find out that Sayori is suffering from depression. In an attempt to comfort her, you can decide whether or not to tell her you love her...or whether you will always see her as your best friend. Unfortunately, whichever choice you pick will result in this:
So not so fluffy anymore.
But don't worry! Monika has figured out how to make the game all better. She decides to erase Sayori's existence in the game, including any reference to her and any save points you had in the game already, and then the game restarts without Sayori. If her absence in the story is notable, the screen will glitch and text is replaced with unreadable script. Okay, but now you have to go through all the maddeningly non-ending poetry discussions...again.
Well, the second time around starts changing up a bit, though. First of all, it seems that Natsuki and Yuri have started a bitter feud, which becomes so intense at one point that Monika intervenes and erases the entire section so you don't have to deal with it. Also, you walk in on Yuri, who is already pretty goth as it is, actually cutting her wrists - this disturbing image fades into a superimposed image of Monika, as she again erases the image.
At this point, art, plot, text and music are slowly eroding. The screen starts to shift and glitch, text appears in hyper-bold script, and you get screens where you are either presented with a choice where you only have one choice ("Just Monika"), or you're given a screen with just "Yes" and "No" on it.
Ultimately Yuri ends up stabbing herself to death after confessing her love to you, and Natsuki vomits when she sees the corpse and runs away. Monika ends up intervening by erasing these two girls...
...And takes you to a dimension wherein she destroys the fourth wall, starts talking to you as the player not the character, about how much she's always wanted to spend time with you but the other girls got all the attention, etc, so she had to make them so unlikeable in the game that you would abandon them. She also goes into a diatribe about the "uncanny valley" - about how if something is just so slightly off, it is much creepier than if it was completely different from how you expect (game self-reflection). She tells you how easy it was to erase their data and then proceeds to give you exact instructions on how to do so (pay attention!). After that she says she just wants to stare at you for a long time...
And proceeds to do so, without giving you any way to click out of the screen. If you try to save the game, she tells you "Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere!"
CREEPY.
So if you've been paying attention at this point, you should know how to go into the game files and erase Monika. Then you can restart the game again with all of the other three girls, but no Monika. Eventually, Sayori ends up confessing to the main character that she wants him/her all to herself, and Monika intervenes once more, thus ending the game entirely.
Okay, so that's the gist of the game play itself. Honestly it was more psychologically disturbing than any number of zombie games I've seen. Even though some aspects of it are fairly obvious to anyone who has studied deconstruction theory, the fact that you are an actor, not just an observer, ties you into the plot more deeply and creates more investment in the story.
Onto the music.
In addition to writing and producing Doki Doki Literature Club!, Dan Salvato also composed the soundtrack. It is fairly upbeat and minimalist with standard synthesized string, guitar, glockenspiel, and drum tracks, and the typical I IV V I chord progression. Especially at the beginning, it fits right in with the visual novel soundtrack, which can bear endless repetitions but perhaps purposefully gets very tiring after awhile. There are separate tracks for various activities and settings, such poetry reading, cupcake making, etc.
Although honestly the melodic and harmonic construction is pretty much deafeningly dull, the synthesized orchestration and balance is fairly well done. There were times when I wanted to rip my headphones out and fling them across the room, but possibly that was the point.
As the story itself becomes darker and the screens start to glitch, the music also follows suit, beginning with a more somber tone as Sayori explains her depression to you and cries in your arms. While still standard and with a painfully tonal harmonic structure, it at least portends the darker tone to come.
After Sayori hangs herself, the familiar welcome screen music starts to distort, with the pitch wavering and bending, and the instrument selection becoming more minimalist with single-hand piano, glockenspiel, and obviously synthesized vocal "Ahhh..."s. When Monika erases her data and restarts the game, the music reverts back to the original songs, but as events start to trigger glitches in the game, the music itself also starts to glitch, including the following elements:
-"broken record" effect
-bit crusher
-intermittent white noise
-rewind effect
-equalizer and reverb
Monika's final two songs, when she takes you out of the game dimension into an uncanny valley reality, are exceptionally atonally minimalist, and utilize more SFX synthesized sounds.
At first I was unimpressed with the soundtrack. It rarely has any interesting harmonic progressions, and the instrumental choices are all sounds easy to create and use synthetically. However, upon viewing this video my opinion changed. There was a lot more consideration that went into the music elements than I originally realized while playing the game, mostly regarding how the creepy elements were created and used.
While I deeply enjoyed the deconstructionist perspective on this genre, the game did so in a very simplistic way overall. There are very few choices for the player to make. It relied almost entirely on breaking the fourth wall for its impact, and the art, sound and story were left lacking in interest as a result. The game is a statement, an interactive film perhaps, and while I enjoyed the experience the first time, I wouldn't play it again. It's worth a recommendation for people who can appreciate deconstructionist theory.
Gameplay: 3/10
Art: 6/10
Music: 9/10
Story: 8/10
Overall: 7/10
