Sayori’s confession of love to the player is a footnote in her broader confession: that she is battling depression, and has been for pretty much all her life. Laying out our mind’s internal workings just sounds to the uninformed like we’re listing off foolish misconceptions, leading to the idea that this can all be fixed if we’re just told loudly and firmly enough to not feel this way.
We know that what goes on in our minds - the things we tell ourselves, the way things look and sound and feel to us - won’t make a lot of sense to people who fundamentally can’t access our experience. Instead of sizing up the bizarre actions of our fellow club members, we should be looking at, as instructed, Just Monika.Īs someone who struggles with mental illness, I can confirm that putting the experience into clear words often feels impossible. 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.
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