Paige FTW: Horror Where You Least Expect It
Doki Doki Literature Club (free to play on Steam) has been taking the internet by storm, so to speak. It’s a delightful, Western-made subversion of the traditional treacly Japanese visual novel, with tendrils that snake into genuine, disturbing horror. It may not get you the way a zombie would, but oh, you do feel scared all the same.
The issue at hand is control. Are you in control?
The premise is simple: You are coerced into joining a literature club with the usual personality types: your chipper childhood best friend, a cutesy tsundere, a busty shy girl and the outgoing club president. Obviously, you hope to get closer to one of the girls … and that’s where it all goes off the rails.
There will be niggling hints that something is not quite right. The girls’ poems (remember, it’s a literature club) are too dark, for instance. Somebody will say something just a little off.
Events will begin to escalate. Your choices suddenly result in ghastly consequences. It’s OK, you think. I’ll just restart.
But you can’t.
The game erases your save files and drops you in a new narrative. It glitches when you try to reference the last playthrough. It starts manipulating your choices, rewinding time when things go awry.
Eventually, through the looking glass the game sees not you, the avatar, but you, the player. Other games, of course, play with the fourth wall — like The Stanley Parable, which we so recently spoke of. But Doki Doki Literature Club is different.
This is a game that … wants something of you. It sees you and mocks your attempts at agency, mocks the idea that you know how to play this kind of game. You don’t, it sneers. These are the new rules. You are seen, and you are not in control after all.
