I spent approximately one hour of this game cringing and questioning my life decisions and the next five desperate for a mod that just makes all these girls happy again. And then there’s Monika, who starts out as one of the school’s most popular students and easily becomes a tragic villain with more similarities to Portal’s GladOs than anything else. The harem of adorable, squabbling schoolgirls, subverting your expectations of them beyond any semblance of reason – happy-go-lucky Sayori succumbing to clinical depression, introverted, intelligent Yuri doing questionable things with stolen pens, diminutive Natsuki having the strength to cope with extreme parental abuse. It offers you choices at every turn – all of them ultimately meaningless.
A solid six hours of my life splurged in one go on anime tropes being upended in horrifying, fascinating ways. “Will I ever be happy again” I asked myself as the credits rolled one final, decisive time, rocking myself to sleep, furious about the fact that I couldn’t purchase a Yuri huggable pillow yet on eBay. “What is this weeby nonsense”, I muttered to myself as the game downloaded. I’m still combing through the resulting backlog now.Īn extended holiday period, one too many shandies, and a questionable habit of falling asleep to episodes of Game Grumps lead me, reluctantly curious, to Doki Doki Literature Club. 2017 was a year that saw me pull away from gaming, focusing instead on things that seemed more important at the time – oh, how wrong I was.
If you had told me at the beginning of 2017 – a year which saw the release of new Zelda, Mario, Resident Evil and Life is Strange titles – that a visual novel would be my defining gaming experience of the year, I would have locked you in an industrial fridge for five days with a feral cat (Well, I’d probably do that anyway if you said literally anything to me at the beginning of last year). Warning – if you haven’t played Doki Doki Literature Club yet there will be spoilers ahead.
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