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It's absolutely at its best when the user interface falls apart and you're mandated to modify the game's files to proceed, but as for a story whose main unspoken message is, "You're a bad person for liking this genre," I think it's been done more effectively elsewhere. The second half of the story, which repeats a lot of the first half Groundhog Day-style but with a lot of the setup removed or warped, is much more interesting than the first, and then it really becomes unhinged.
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I almost lost that patience many times, but I'm glad I didn't. Several of your choices are made for you, and while a lot of that makes more sense later on, I didn't find it enjoyable to play through at the time and would imagine a lot of readers would lose patience long before the story started revealing its good tricks (one of which I did find very startling even as it had more to do with the medium than the characters). The plot is initially very thin, followed by a barrage of increasingly disturbing twists (the twists are reasonably well done, but the story is so uneventful and uninteresting without them that I found myself waiting in suspense for something to happen even if I knew it was going to be awful), and the gameplay initially consists of selecting words from a pile (20 words per poem, each word selected from a list of 10 choices, and you do this several times) and occasionally selecting choices (which girl do you want to spend time with, etc.). The characters aren't much - they're designed to be very one-dimensional, from the lovestruck but bashful childhood best friend to the drama queen who likes cute things and so on. "Surprise! Someone self-harmed." The content warnings were welcome, but the bigger issue I had, rather than any of the death or gore, was that I found some of the game's intentional glitches and graphical effects to be visually jarring and possibly painful if you're photosensitive. (I spent extra hours browsing articles about the game and finishing up the few alternate outcomes, one of which is very quick and the other effectively requires you to play the game several times over again.)ĭoki Doki has placed a lot of emphasis on its characterization of depression and mental struggles, and while I thought it did make a number of useful observations (one severely depressed character can become your girlfriend, but this doesn't magically make her emotional state healthier or prevent her from taking her life) and I didn't mind the unbridled intensity of its themes in themselves, the story seemed as often as not to use these for simple shock value, which I didn't always consider to be tasteful. The first two and a half hours of this visual novel (where it pretends to be a dating sim, though the abhorrent pacing is by design) were one of the dullest things I've ever read, and I welcomed each of the few strange events that broke the monotony, right up until the twists began unfolding and the game really started developing-though, by that point, it's more than halfway over. I do think you'll want to go in with an awareness of the gimmick- it turns into a horror game as various characters reveal their emotional struggles or nefarious motives-while you're probably aware that this isn't a straightforward dating sim, if you go in expecting it to at least look the part, you're going to be disappointed in many ways. I won't say that Doki Doki Literature Club is worth exploring entirely without preexisting knowledge.