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Doki Doki Literature Club review

last updated 2023-09-16

Doki Doki Literature Club is a visual novel that subverts the anime dating sim genre by first appearing to be one and then becoming psychological horror. It is far and away the most powerful story I've ever seen; so powerful it's the only story I've ever read fanfiction for, and not only did I read it, I wrote it!

Okay. So, since it's really a story which depends so much on a fundamental twist, there's not a whole lot I can say to convince you without spoiling it. Here's what I think I can say:

A few content warnings for this story: it depicts self-harm, suicide, abuse (not too explicit), and maybe other disturbing topics. But I feel it treats these things with respect, unlike, say, Blasphemous.

Blasphemous review

DDLC gave me trouble falling asleep for a while, when no other game had since my early childhood. But I can't hate it for that, because the way it did it was amazingly beautiful.

The game is free to play and only took about 4 hours for my first playthrough, plus about 4 more to see all the remaining content (which I highly recommend!).

It also has some great mods (well, really fan VNs, but the community calls them mods). In particular, I thought The Good Ending, Monika Before Story, and Doki Doki Salvation were really good.

In fact, I was so into the DDLC community for so long that I even had like 15 reviews of mods I'd played on this site. I eventually took them all down due to my changing perspective about reviews. I even made 2 mods (and other fan content) myself, which I've never done for any other game or story!

my own DDLC fan content

Incase, after playing, you're like me and might get so into DDLC mods, I'll call out 2 little tools that were super helpful for playing them: shizmob's rpatool for unpacking .rpa archives, and CensoredUsername's unrpyc for decompiling .rpyc files into human-readable .rpy scripts. I normally used these to look at the scripts after playing to see if I'd missed any endings, and check for secrets in the vein of the original game. If you edit the scripts and set config.developer to True, you can use shift+O to open the developer console in-game and run commands. This is useful for working around bugs.

rpatool

unrpyc

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