Doki Doki Literature Club is not my cup of tea, nor a cookie or a cupcake. It’s like the rock-hard chicken tenders you found in the back of the fridge that you had to choke down with a swig of water because you were starving at 2am. It was a means to an end. I’ll fully admit it probably wasn’t the game itself, but something about me. There’s a reason why this is the first meta-visual novel I’ve played more than three minutes of. In many games, the lack of realism or choice is bolstered by intensive gaming sequences or an immersive and more relatable plot. In this visual novel, at least before everything starts glitching, I would start to feel immersed in the story only to be yanked out again by a strange action or dialogue that *I* would never consider carrying out. In some games, you customize a character or invest time into them so that on a certain level you begin to associate some part of yourself with them. In other games, they give you enough choice so that the outcomes that occur feel like yours. Still in other games, the plot is so outlandish, all-encompassing, or persuasive that the player falls into the character. And in some games, the choices or plot are something you relate with naturally. These games can pull off the use of first-person dialogue because the player identifies with the character in some way. Many other games use the second person, usually implied, as in “[You] Press A to jump.” This can work because the game is ordering you to accept its rules and by doing so, at the very least, there is an agreement between the player and the avatar they control. And on that level, they relate. Doki Doki Literature Club didn’t do any of these things for me. It was the use of first person for a character you don’t control enough to feel in sync with and it broke the illusion.
I forced myself to get to the twists and from there, I found the game interesting. The illusion was fully broken, but it didn’t need one to convince me to keep playing. But I also started to identify with my own character in the space because we shared an experience, both in the game and in real life. Despite this, I still went on Wikipedia and read about the different endings because I was curious. And the interesting thing was that reading the endings, I felt more connected than I had at any point during my own playthrough because suddenly I was just reading a short story about four anime girls and a player. The choices I made weren’t for myself, but instead they were like advice that’s taken 100% of the time for someone that I wanted to have a happy ending. Speaking of happy endings, Save the Date initially had the same feeling as Doki Doki Literature Club for me, but by revealing more of the endings, it forced itself to be relatable through its self-acknowledgement. I hope Felicia is happy, because no one playing these games is going to be.
Okay, I’m going to watch some Let’s Play videos so I can see some twenty-something gamers scream and swear at the jump scares now. Then watch them complain about the game or something like that; that’ll cheer me up.
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