[CW] Ghost Under the Light

Content Warning: suicide [screenshots], self-harm, depression

Review pop quiz: Doki Doki Literature Club is __________.

A) disturbing

B) entertaining

C) jarring

D) melodramatic

Wrong. The answer is all of the above. Oh, that wasn’t an option? Sorry, you don’t really have a choice. Choices are illusions.

Minus some easy-to-miss foreshadowing, the first half of the Doki Doki plays like an innocuous, lightly interactive high school simulator. But the narrative takes a very sudden turn as your childhood friend Sayori reveals her chronic depression and heartache. (Incidentally, doki doki どきどき refers to the sound of a heartbeat.) No matter how you try to support her, Sayori hangs herself in a graphically-distorted scene framed by discordant music and the player's painfully realistic inner monologue. You frantically rack your brain for missed red flags: “What did I do wrong? This is my fault—! [...] I could have prevented this.” You lament not being able to just “reset and try something different.”

The game then takes a massive meta turn: the interface glitches and the background image is replaced by a scripting error that references Ren.py, Doki Doki’s game engine. You suddenly find yourself back at the main menu. Now, however, the “New Game” option is corrupted and replaced by a string of invalid characters: ½Ì`☐`|3ŠŸÚ☐,ß¾!wÚ☐U"·çý~(£ZÄ#‘☐„d‘ö-

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Sayori’s unheralded death triggers a rapid descent into psychological horror and induces an unshakable paranoia. Events that follow—most of which are equally distressing—challenge the rules of reality or, rather, the rules of the game world as everything starts to break down: character relationships, motives, and identities, the chronology of events, communication, reality, hallucinations.

In a lot of ways, this dramatic about-face represents a betrayal of player trust. Playing a video game implies a sort of contract in which the player agrees to suspend their disbelief and submit to certain rules. But Doki Doki throws this agreement back in the player’s face—not just once, but repeatedly throughout the rest of the game. Oh, you thought this was a light, cheery simulator? Here’s some suicide. You'd like to go back and rescue your friend? Too bad, all your savegames have been deleted. You thought this narrative would be purely diegetic? Here are some deliberate graphical glitches and scripting errors. At the very least, you assumed that the game would occur entirely within the game. Wrong again: go rummage around in Steam’s directory and delete some character files.

Monika, the president of the literature club, is eventually revealed to be obsessed with you, the IRL player. After you manually delete her character file, an overarching theme is punctuated by her handwritten note: “The Literature Club is truly a place where no happiness can be found. To the very end, it continued to expose innocent minds to a horrific reality—a reality that our world is not designed to comprehend.” Thus we are forced to reflect on how the game has manipulated us and exposed us to something horrific—something we weren’t prepared for. Not suicide or trauma or violence, but the deconstructed nature of the game world. We lose faith in the integrity of the narrative framework. We doubt our own agency and are pressed to ask again and again a question posed in-game as an unlockable redacted poem: “n—o—th—in—g—i—s—re—a—l—?”

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Since as a visual novel the game’s aesthetic and textual delivery shape the player’s experience, below is a series of images that highlight certain themes and design choices.

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Language breaks down the further along you progress. Not only can you not trust the information offered by characters, but you often cannot even understand it. The player is forced to stay with Yuri’s corpse over the weekend, held captive by the game’s dialogue mechanic. You cannot proceed without completing the time-consuming text, which is hundreds of unintelligible lines long. (Even auto-advancing at max speed takes considerable time.)

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This brief disappearance of Natsuki’s face reflects a central theme of the game: choice is irrelevant. You can change you mind, but it’s an empty gesture. You can try to erase yourself, your choices, your past, but nothing will change. Tragedy and dissolution are inevitable.

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Manually deleting character files from the game’s directory causes visual and textual glitching--which, notably, is part of the designers’ intent. As far as I’m aware, this magnitude of fourth-wall violation is unprecedented.

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Identity breaks down as the game progresses. As a kind of genre parody, Yuri’s confession of love is superimposed with Monika’s likeness, suggesting that it no longer really matters who’s speaking; the girls’ collective obsession is abstracted.