And that’s because, when it comes to the game’s slowly unraveling middle arc, we’re not looking in the right direction.

However, even in the face of the game’s second act and Yuri’s full yandere switch, it provides one of the strongest depictions of mental illness I’ve ever seen in media. But it wasn’t the mainstream media’s unsurprising take on the “killer game” that surprised me it was the claim of many in the gaming community that DDLC is a poor, even insulting, portrayal of mental illness. Naturally, anything that blends dark subject matter and cute art will spark “think of the children” controversy, no matter how many layers of warnings you put over it. They also told me this game was absolutely “my thing.” By the time the game was glitching out and baring its Ren’Py code at me, I knew my friends weren’t wrong.ĭoki Doki Literature Club is the brainchild of Dan Salvato and his friends at Team Salvato, and isn’t so much a love letter to dating sims as an invitation to an intervention.

I knew the title Doki Doki Literature Club at this point - fellow industry members spoke of it in the same ominous, “you have no idea what you’re in for” tone as anime series like Ringing Bell and Madoka Magica.

In 2018, I found a visual novel in my Steam library that I was sure I hadn’t ordered. This article contains discussion of mental illness, self-harm, and suicide.