Doki Doki Literature Club! debuted in 2017, but its unexpected story and novel mechanics earned it a cult following that makes it popular to this day. Presented as a visual novel that allows the player to pursue a romance with one of the game's four girls, instead, it goes much deeper and darker to tell a twisted story about mental health and the very nature of reality.
Beginning as a simple visual novel, Doki Doki Literature Club! invites the player to join an afterschool club at his high school. The only other members are three girls, most of whom immediately start vying for the player's affections. There are few choices to be made here, except players do get to craft poems targeted toward whichever character they'd like to pursue. Poem creation then becomes the primary method of interaction with the club's members, adding to its charm and strange set of mechanics.
Doki Doki Literature Club! eventually goes off the rails, however. The first act of the game builds some intense and strange if not outright horrific relationships with some of the characters and ends with one of them dying by suicide. It's an intense shift from a game that masquerades as a dating sim and has focused on mundane -- even cute -- problems.
But Doki Doki Literature Club! only slides further into the realms of terror. After the first act's horrific events, players can experience the game again, except all of their save files have been deleted. More than that, the character file for the girl who died by suicide has also been deleted. This is only the start of the game messing with its own files -- text files and images will be added during further playthroughs, and eventually, players will have to modify some files themselves to progress.
The horror of Doki Doki Literature Club! doesn't just come from the uneasy events or meta-awareness of the game's files. During the second play-through, it becomes clear that the Literature Club's president Monika is aware that this is a game -- she has been the one modifying the files. The game starts to intentionally glitch, showing wrong text or unreadable Unicode characters. Character art is randomly edited to shift, bleed or even appear on top of the text so that everything feels very wrong.
Most of the game's intentional glitches only have a small probability of occurring. The community of Doki Doki Literature Club! fans have worked together to uncover all of the game's twisted Easter eggs. Some have even dived into the source code to uncover corrupted dialogue or adjusted image lighting to uncover hidden poems. The deeper fans have explored, the more secrets the game seems to reveal, contributing to its cult status and wide popularity.
Doki Doki Literature Club! is a wild ride of a game, subverting the visual novel's expectations and the dating sim. The horror game hidden underneath asks players to interact in new and off-putting ways, adding to the growing sense of unease the game elicits. Because of this mature and novel approach to crafting fear, Doki Doki Literature Club! remains to this day a notorious gem of a game.