ATTENTION: MERELY DISCUSSING WHY THIS GAME IS SPECIAL IS A SPOILER IN ITSELF. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK
Here's the short and spoiler-free version: Doki Doki Literature Club is a free visual novel on Steam that's blown up absolutely massively, especially among streamers and let's players over the last 2 months or so. Pretty much everyone from Game Grumps to Pewdiepie has played it. It currently stands at an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam with over 70,000 reviews. The plot concerns the player character joining a high school literature club with a few girls (despite this being western made, it's clearly emulating the anime style). And that's about all one can say about it. If this has piqued your interest, I'd suggest playing the game yourself and not looking up any videos about it. It's free anyway.
Got that?
Anyway, just some general thoughts I wanted to get out. It's been a fascinating anomaly to follow to say the least, and I think the developers have garnered a level of goodwill from this game that will last them for a good while.
Here's the short and spoiler-free version: Doki Doki Literature Club is a free visual novel on Steam that's blown up absolutely massively, especially among streamers and let's players over the last 2 months or so. Pretty much everyone from Game Grumps to Pewdiepie has played it. It currently stands at an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam with over 70,000 reviews. The plot concerns the player character joining a high school literature club with a few girls (despite this being western made, it's clearly emulating the anime style). And that's about all one can say about it. If this has piqued your interest, I'd suggest playing the game yourself and not looking up any videos about it. It's free anyway.
Got that?
It's almost like a creepypasta from the mid-2000s, but an actual game. A game that knows you're playing it. A game that knows your real name. A game that starts to fuck with its own code and files to twist itself into a nightmare. Never mind the shitty recreations of Sonic.exe, Doki Doki Literature Club is the real horror.
Now I didn't actually play this game myself, because I already got spoiled about it in Indeimaus's video where he edited the whole game down to around 30 minutes. Granted, I don't play visual novels to begin with. But the way it's blown up in the youtube gaming sphere has been nothing short of immensely satisfying to follow. I started following Game Grumps' playthrough obsessively, and it was just magical.
I guess in a way you could call this the Eternal Darkness of the 2010s, since points of comparison for this sort of thing are few and far between. And they kind of have to be: the kind of scares this game makes have to be rare and unexpected enough to be effective. DDLC has the added bonus effect of being a seemingly cutesy, independently developed, and free, visual novel on Steam so it's basically the last place you'd expect to find a horror game that goes full on meta in multiple and unpredictable ways. The streamer and let's players' reaction compilations say it all: that this game caught everybody off guard. Especially since it spends hours upon hours seeming like exactly what it says on the tin. But then it pulls the rug from under the player's feet, punches them in the nuts and blows up their house.
I'm really glad this game's success has been documented so thoroughly. Because it's captured lightning in a bottle in a way that can't be replicated for the next 10 years. I have a feeling this will go down as a benchmark in streaming history to which all other games that "you just have to stream" will be compared in terms of how vital the streamers' reactions are to the experience.
The downside to this game is that once you've watched a Let's Play of it, there's really no point in playing it yourself. Which kind of lends it a gimmicky air: ooh, we spooked ya good didn't we! Okay, move along then, nothing else to see here. But I don't think even that's really fair, considering this game's team was like 5 people, and it's donwloadable for free on top of that.
Now I didn't actually play this game myself, because I already got spoiled about it in Indeimaus's video where he edited the whole game down to around 30 minutes. Granted, I don't play visual novels to begin with. But the way it's blown up in the youtube gaming sphere has been nothing short of immensely satisfying to follow. I started following Game Grumps' playthrough obsessively, and it was just magical.
I guess in a way you could call this the Eternal Darkness of the 2010s, since points of comparison for this sort of thing are few and far between. And they kind of have to be: the kind of scares this game makes have to be rare and unexpected enough to be effective. DDLC has the added bonus effect of being a seemingly cutesy, independently developed, and free, visual novel on Steam so it's basically the last place you'd expect to find a horror game that goes full on meta in multiple and unpredictable ways. The streamer and let's players' reaction compilations say it all: that this game caught everybody off guard. Especially since it spends hours upon hours seeming like exactly what it says on the tin. But then it pulls the rug from under the player's feet, punches them in the nuts and blows up their house.
I'm really glad this game's success has been documented so thoroughly. Because it's captured lightning in a bottle in a way that can't be replicated for the next 10 years. I have a feeling this will go down as a benchmark in streaming history to which all other games that "you just have to stream" will be compared in terms of how vital the streamers' reactions are to the experience.
The downside to this game is that once you've watched a Let's Play of it, there's really no point in playing it yourself. Which kind of lends it a gimmicky air: ooh, we spooked ya good didn't we! Okay, move along then, nothing else to see here. But I don't think even that's really fair, considering this game's team was like 5 people, and it's donwloadable for free on top of that.
