Doki Doki Literature Club

Doki Doki Literature Club is a freeware indie EVN by Team Salvato that has generated quite a bit of buzz. As of this writing r/DDLC has more readers than r/visualnovels. This is a game best played blind, but it is not shy about its secrets; you will be given multiple content warnings.

I recommend this one to anyone who is generally comfortable with psychological horror titles, emphasis on psychological. (If the repeated content warnings make you anxious, this probably isn’t the game for you, Salvato really isn’t kidding.) At the beginning you are treated to a bog-standard bishōjo premise as a guy who joins his high school’s literature club and is happy to discover all the members are cute girls who want to get to know him better. I personally found the beginning a bit slow, I was eager to get to the good stuff. Well, you won’t have to wait long. Stick with it.

I recommend this one to fans of psychological horror, subversion, or really… anything unique or different involving genre expectations/game mechanics. The attention to detail is pretty awesome, and as someone who is familiar with the ins-and-outs of EVNs and this particular engine, I was impressed by the level of thought that went into it. I’ll leave it at that.

I did several PTs to get all the endings, but I think one full PT is effective and the way the game is structured you get most of the content in the first run. I think you can get the full experience in 3 to 4 hours.