Treatment of Mental Illness in Act One of DDLC

[DDLC spoilers included. Content Warning: mental illness, depression, suicide]

Today in class we talked about many great concepts which I will try to include here. At the foreground of our discussion on Doki Doki Literature Club was the game’s attention to mental illness. I think it’s very fair to examine the ways Yuri and Natsuki die and criticize the presentation of their mental illnesses as being exploited, incomplete, and perhaps ignorant of the depth of mental illness. However, I think there’s a good reason for this presentation. It’s not that DDLC fails to pay proper respects to and appropriately convey the depth of mental illness: it’s just that DDLC isn’t a game which aims, mainly, to educate on mental illness in the first place. We’ve talked a bit about the purpose of games in this class: some games are made to have fun, others are educational, and some are just jarring. I personally think DDLC takes pieces from each of these categories and, in doing so, maybe misses some conventional parts of fun/educational/jarring games. For now I'll just speak briefly about the educational bit.

Before the twisted meta-narrative of the game is revealed, Doki Doki seems like your typical moe visual novel. However, in the events leading up to Sayori’s confession and subsequent suicide, there are subtle but definitely existent signs of her depression—especially at the confession scene. I first played through the game blind, but even then, the confession scene gave me subtle yet clear red flags of “something serious is up and you should not leave Sayori’s side at any cost from this point on.” Maybe I was more sensitive to these cues due to my past experiences and upbringing, but nonetheless I think it’s important to give credit to Team Salvato for creating such a subtle presentation of depression. Considering the possibility--at such an early point in the game, in a blind playthrough--of mental illness even being a thing that exists in such a normal-seeming romance game is a level of awareness that I think Dan Salvato is at least partially intending to impart upon his audience.

I really don’t think Sayori’s depression was exploited or at all taken as a joke in the first act of DDLC. In fact, if DDLC ended with Sayori’s death, it would be (bit of a hot take, but bear with me) a commendable game about the subtleties and seriousness of depression symptoms. Of course, I think this completely stops being true with the introduction of a meta narrative and the (purposefully) sudden deaths of other protagonists, because past that point it's just not what the game is going for, but the first act of DDLC is worth mentioning as a standalone segment of the game.