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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:

It takes advantage of its format to go outside the box and tell a story that simply couldn't be told in any other format.

It showed to me an entire realm of story design space that I hadn't even realized was possible: inbetween read-only and player-inserted. The game has a "player" character that you name and make occasional choices for, but who isn't to be thought of as "you". I learned to see myself as a voice in his mind with my own goals and that could have only murky communication with him.

Even before the twist, it's far too hilarious to ever get bored. The characters' personalities are so entertaining and the writing makes great use of them.

While the line-level dialogue isn't perfect, the conversation flow is excellent. This story was able to put me through long conversations about poetry - something I had absolutely no interst in - without any input and I never once got bored.

Speaking of poetry: this story also taught me to appreciate poetry. Before I played it I pretty much wrote off poetry as pretentious junk; after, I wrote a few poems myself.

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.

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!

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.

Doki Doki Literature Club review