There’s the childhood friend, the feisty girl who pretends to be not interested in you, the shy and reserved girl, and while I wouldn’t really peg the last girl Monika as anything too typical, describing her as the popular girl tells you enough about her despite it not being a character type usually found on a dating sim docket. While the girls are fairly well written and with enough personality that they aren’t just generic stereotypes, they do slot in into pretty simple roles that you’ll often find in video games of this ilk. You’re a high school student who has been encouraged to join the school’s literature club, which already has four anime girls as members that your player character is immediately interested in potentially dating. For anyone aware of the tropes found within the visual novel and dating sim genres, it starts off feeling like simply a decently well written game set in those genres. This simple way of alerting the player that there is something more to this game than a run-of-the-mill dating sim manages to instill the expectation of something unique and interesting without completely revealing its hand, and it is probably one of the smarter ways of generating interest without hinging on complete spoiler avoidance.ĭoki Doki Literature Club does start off playing things absolutely straight despite the disclaimers. Quite often people will try to recommend a game like this with phrases like “Don’t look up anything about it, just play it,” and it can lead to disappointment or may even make the player leave before whatever strange twist awaits them has the time to crop up. Despite having the trappings of a visual novel dating sim, Doki Doki Literature Club’s Steam page has the “Psychological Horror” tag loud and prominent, and the game description and the opening screen of the game itself warn about potentially disturbing content. The characters are human first.If you have heard about Doki Doki Literature Club before this review, then you likely know that the game is not what it seems… then again, the game does not really try to hide that fact. Without getting into spoilers, Doki Doki Literature Club criticizes that tendency in its own writing. I think mental health becomes exploited when it’s isolated from the character into a tokenized or romanticized plot device, downgrading the human character into some kind of problem-creating caricature. We feel that so strongly in characters, and we don’t want to fault them for their mistakes. Those who are neurodivergent especially relate to the internal struggle - that our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors don’t always align with the person we truly want to be. We empathize with those characters and want them to succeed in the face of adversity. I wanted to create characters with relatable human traits based on my own experiences and observations in life. Salvato: The characters are human, first. How were you able to achieve this balance with such delicate topics? But it never feels exploitative or demeaning, even when used as the impetus for the horror elements of the game. PCI: Doki Doki Literature Club tackles a lot of heavy subject matter, including mental illness.
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