One week after the gameplay and I could still recall when I was forced to stare into Yuri’s lifeless face for minutes before I learned to use the “skip” button. This is just a small part of Monica’s “manipulating”. In Doki Doki Literature Club, time manipulation is used a lot to demonstrate Monica’s control over the game.
For instance, when we first experience the glitches talking with the girls, the game suddenly cuts to the poem-writing scene, which is supposed to happen after the day ends. We are warped into some time in the “future”.
Another time disturbance is when we see Yuri almost choked herself, and suddenly she shows up in front of us like nothing happened. In this case, we are taken into the past.
During the game, the broken time linearity is an indication of Monica’s manipulation of game experience, and her power over the players’. This power dynamic of character over the player is the key part of this “meta” game experience, and time manipulation, in this case, is a “meta” feature of Doki Doki Literature Club.
Come to think of it, “time manipulation” is a feature of graphic and visual novels we don’t usually pay much attention to, since it has always been a privilege of the reader/player. When we are reading a graphic novel, we can decide which page we want to skip and which we want to reread. The pacing of the timeline is always in our hands. On the other hand, when we are reading visual novels, we get to save/load the plot, and dive into whichever part of the story we choose to see. As we restart the game, the characters would forget everything as the past has been erased.
In Doki Doki Literature Club, however, Monica takes our power away. We restart the game, yet she keeps the time flowing and what happened is not erased; she plays with the flow of time, so that the players would be forced to witness what she wants us to see. We are shocked and terrified when we are being tossed around in the flow of time. Doki Doki Literature Club has succeeded frightening us with the meta of our time manipulation over novels.
Also worth mentioning is that the game world seems to freeze if we close it. Monica would ask us what just happened if we reopen the game, and it was a moment of reassurance for me —— since we still can decide when to stop.
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