f13.net

http://store.steampowered.com/app/698780/Doki_Doki_Literature_Club/

Don't read the Polygon article. Just download it, play it, and let's talk about it.

I... what? I think I've seen enough anime to know where this is going...

u know nothing john redneck

It’s the one that starts off as a dating sim except that  isn’t it?

it came out 2 months ago

if you don't remember then you don't remember

goty

Estimated playtime?

That is if you can get over the first 45 minutes of absolutely agonizing and brainkilling boredom.

30 min

but yea

the right length

THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID!  :why_so_serious:

-5 points to house redneck

finished it

yeg, 3 hours

goty

Anyway, no. Just no. I love all the things that this game is supposed to be inspired to/from and it still doesn't do anything for me. In fact, I almost feel trolled after getting carpal tunnel syndrome to click as fast as possible through an hour of mindboggling boredom shit only to get to the juicy part which is not interesting nor original at all. I can name a few games that did something similar in the past few years and that I had a much better time with, and in fact I am pretty convinced this is all a big joke. From Schild pretending to like it to Steam ratings being 99999% positive, and finally to this guy named Dan Salvato, the author, who teases us into something that never ever gets interesting no matter how disturbing he gratuitously tries to make it while basically making us go over the same shit more than once dancing at the pace of his laughs at our expenses. At least it was free. Except for the three hours I won't get back.

Skip this. Play or re-play Everlasting Summer instead.

I see someone clicked through the entire weekend process instead of just clicking auto.

Name another game like this though pls. There's a handful of extremely indie games that toyed with these ideas but none pulled them off with any success.

Could it have been better?

Sure.

Does it need to be?

Nah.

First of all, I don't believe you liked it. I think you are still fucking with me.
And I ditched the AUTO function cause I didn't think it could go through all the boring fluff fast enough.

Anyway, I am not even sure what are the ideas that you think are so unique.


have some of it in one way or another, except they are not


Yet I don't even think this game is even trying to say anything about the dark things it shows and tackles, it just uses them all of a sudden to create discomfort. To feel disturbing. To confuse and sway from the utter and complete emptiness of what is going on.
There is NO story here (and certainly no gameplay), and Dan Salvato is NOT David Lynch. What exactly is there to like?

But hey maybe I am missing something that I usually don't miss, so I would like to hear your and everyone else's opinion beside "goty". Hell, Depression Quest is more compelling than this.

Depression quest was not compelling.

I would like that stricken from the record.

No, of course it wasn't.

Ill type up something tomorrow but id like to let other people play it and have them tell me im crazy also.

When is this meant to get good?

I think Schild just really likes postmodernism in his video games. Which is fine and all but, objectively, that was a whole lot of clicking for not a lot of payoff. I didn't dislike it as intensely as Falc, but he's right - the only real surprises were
Game has all the trappings of a good mindfuck but somehow my mind just doesn't feel fucked with.

This is shite. I agree with falc.

No impact on me at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXcwYgoGR0E

Skip to 13:00 if you don't feel like reading the buildup. Game isn't translated in English, except for this part. But it does Visual Novel meta way better than DDLC does. Not that I disliked DDLC, for a free and short game I liked it.

how's the porn tho?

boy, that depends on your definition

i kinda thought the song at the end was too Portal-y for my tastes.

The song was the best part of the game to me and that says a lot considering I didn't even like it because it smelled of "let's try and pull a Portal here!" from the very first three notes all the way to the end. Even the lyrics go there, between Portal 1 and 2.

You're not my supervisor.

This was a good project and I'm glad this guy made this game.

I could normally have cared less about any visual novel character and at the end of this I just had this bitter, melancholic sense of regretting that there's no more game left in which you can play out the rest of the story and make everyone happy.

Game didn't need to be anything else, IMO

okay fine, installing

I think it’s very good for a free 3 hour game.

wtf

Spoilery question:

Okay, still not done, but put me down in the "worth playing" camp.

And done.  I think about 2 hours playtime.

Anyone else go in and decipher the character files?  Two are .PNGs, one is an .OGG, and one is base64 ASCII (far and away the best one).   :awesome_for_real:

Did not. Link them here.

I made a backup of Monika's around the time she suggested it (restoring it doesn't do anything btw, and after the next restart it's gone again anyway) and while I was looking at it I popped it open in Notepad, saw the PNG header, etc.  Then when the others turned out to not be valid PNGs I looked at them to figure out what they were.

Googled, someone on Reddit has already helpfully assembled them all (https://www.reddit.com/r/ARG/comments/71z2pt/doki_doki_literature_club_has_more_to_it_than_we/) and got a little further than I did in digging stuff out like the QR codes and whatnot.

wtf is this even.

Stopped reading this thread when I decided to install and play the game. Could only play it in small chunks due to lack of time over the weekend, so...

Well, thanks to Schild to getting me in touch with my nerdy inner 14 year old Japanese boy. Also thanks to Schild for traumatizing him so much I'll never have to speak with him again...

Seriously, a good game that I thought could have been shorter, and longer, and less graphic, and more. If you wanted Stanley's Parable as expressed as a Anime Visual Novel, then this really isn't it, but it's kinda like that.

Lines I liked (spoilered)


And yeah, I actually liked the poems.

Can you even get through that section on auto mode?  It felt to me like it'd hit some sort of infaloop bad state, so I quit the game and restarted and I was at the next week.   :awesome_for_real:

(edit) I was hoping that we'd get some sort of procedurally generated mad-lib poetry built from our selections.  But I did really like the girls' poems, that was some pretty solid storytelling IMO.

I didn't see it as really great storytelling, really.

The deal with the president is (big spoiler)

But it wouldn't be obvious at all to your 14 (or so, maybe 15?) year old nerdy "Anime is the closest I get to literature" character. Not obvious at all, and even if it was not much you could figure to do about it at your age/experience.

Honestly, these Visual Novel type things require a certain level of roleplaying to meet the story halfway. I found the circumstances of


But not saying you are wrong in not liking it. It doesn't play right for what you like in gaming. I'm certainly going to be pretty careful in which of my RL friends I recommend it to. Some will love it, others would share your take.

I simply don't get why this is a thing worth talking about. I mean, I do understand: it's the shock of a couple of scenes and the hype coming from it. If you play visual novels at all, you know they often involve very uncomfortable and disturbing themes and/or toying with the player's emotions. And there are so many free and good (and disturbing) ones even on Steam that I really don't see what's the big deal here at all.

This is about:


OK.

I don't think it's terrible. I think it's just not good at all.

I'm gonna be less careful about spoilers since we're on page 2 now.

Most of what I liked about it was the fourth wall breaking stuff.  The glitches in the UI, the visible seams between the "original" game and the hastily-hacked version, the fact that part of the story involves you actually deleting a file off your real filesystem.  It's the same thing I liked about Stanley Parable, and while this is a much less polished experience, I feel like it went further in some areas.

The slow buildup makes it feel very uneven, but I don't think the game would have worked as well without it.  On my second playthrough I could tell very quickly that the two girls were "not themselves," because I had a pretty good sense of their characters from the first playthrough, and there was a cool psychological horror aspect to that.

That said, I really enjoyed Papers Please which is 95% literally a paperwork simulator and 5% a story told through the very unusual lens of a paperwork simulator.

Yeah, I get that you and schild like that the game is in love with itself. That doesn't do anything for me but I see how that works.

The thematic and emotional of content of the game is poorly written and glibly uses real and unsettling topics for shock effect, poorly.

The meta humor and obsessive self involvement is done better, bit I'm not that interested in that to give a pass on the time spent slogging through the rest of it

Starting this now; haven't ready any spoilers and I'm still pretty early. Is this something I'm going to want to play through to get a route for each girl?

just play the game

it's not worth playing to see all the bits, you'll end up doing the right path (to see the best game stuff) the first time

addressing your 3 spoiler bits without being spoilerish

1. this is the least interesting part of the game
2. this part, I thought, was done pretty well, but I haven't really praised the story in this game at all
3. no, you're just wrong, it's not "repetitive by design" because it's simply not repetitive. while on your second and third punching through of the story, there are things repeated, the game itself is not repeating, things are wildly different - to wit, the "second" playthrough was vastly superior to the first - which was the weakest

To me it was repetitive even before it started actually repeating itself. I mean, on your first run you go through three days where you are all trading poems with each other. I couldn't believe it. That's when I felt I was being mocked. "Is this thing really gonna force me through three sessions of amateur-kawaii-hour of terribad poems trading in order for something to fucking actually happen?"

Yes.

My solution: play through once - then watch endings on youtube.

Oh wow, I didn't even realize you could get a happy ending.

Massage parlor joke.

 :rimshot: