It’s a good thing that the game has these content warnings, of course, but they do undermine the impact a little bit, in that, even if you don’t know the story, you’re effectively being told to expect to be shocked. Without giving anything away, if you’re sensitive to particularly uncomfortable themes and visual imagery, then you really should heed the content warnings. Right from the start, the game gives you plenty of content warnings, and you should heed them. Even in its darkest moments (and it gets so incredibly dark) there’s a wit about the game that remains overwhelmingly entertaining. It leans into the same kind of self-aware storytelling that makes creepypasta stories so fun, and ultimately, Doki Doki’s satire remains fun throughout in the same vein. It plays with the idea that the few choices that you make in dating VNs matter. It plays with pacing, too – the subversion starts to happen so late into the game that, right before it did, I was actually wondering if the reputation that the game has was itself some kind of meta-joke across the Internet. What I can say is that Doki Doki uses every trick at its disposal it makes heavy use of fourth-wall-breaking interactions directly with the player (rather than the avatar that represents the player). I know that what I’ve written there is vague, but it’s difficult to describe how Doki Doki does its deconstruction without giving its messaging away, and I’m going to assume that there are some people out there who, like me, have the opportunity to experience the game for the first time here. It aims to pull at the very structural threads that bind the “dating game” visual novel together to better understand and appreciate it.
With that being said, where a lot of other western VNs do so purely for the purposes of mockery – subversion-as-insult, as such – there’s some genuine and - I believe - well-meaning deconstruction work at play with Doki Doki. A lot gets said about how western visual novel developers often play with the anime VN format with less-than-genuine intent to satirise or criticise the form, and Doki Doki Literature Club is probably one of the earlier examples of that. But that’s all I knew about it, and therefore Doki Doki Plus was able to land its full impact on me. I knew that it was a game that looked and felt like a dating simulator, right up until the point that it veers in a wildly different direction. I was aware that it was a horror game and the initially bright and bubbly presentation was all a ruse. I’ve been fortunate in that I was able to go into Doki Doki Literature Club Plus having never played the original, and also not knowing a whole lot about it.
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