How Doki Doki Literature Club Paints an (Almost) Authentic Picture of Depression

From one angle, Team Salvato’s (free) visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club looks like an attempt to capture a bit of Undertale‘s signature metafictional magic. A game that begins as a piece in a well-defined genre ends up being anything but—picking apart both the mechanical and narrative tropes that a player might expect from, respectively, a visual novel or a JRPG. From that angle, however, the law of diminishing returns has taken its toll; while DDLC is at least interesting in its self-awareness and its deconstruction of the implicit horror narrative of its genre (hey look, people programmed to inevitably fall in love with you), it’s no Undertale.

But then again, nothing is, and that comparison actually overshadows the one thing that Doki Doki Literature Club does brutally well—a piece of character work that’s impressive in its simplicity, truthfulness, and the way it uses the illusion of choice to make a point about how fiction often treats depression.

[Spoilers ahead for a short, free game. You’ve been warned.]

[Also, content warning for depression and suicide in both this post and the game itself. If you decide to play this game, take its warnings seriously.]

At the beginning of DDLC, the game introduces you to Sayori—your tropey next-door neighbor and (by your internal monologue) lifelong-friend-by-proximity-rather-than-choice. You usually walk to school together, but she’s always just late enough to keep you annoyed and waiting.

This is the first thing the game does right.

As the game introduces its world (through somewhat painful text that really undersells the effectiveness of the game’s writing), Sayori drags you to the titular Literature Club, where you—a typical, fairly shitty high school male—decide to stay because hey this club is full of girls. And so begins the game’s first act, which plays like a normal dating sim—you have conversations, make a couple of seemingly-meaningful choices, and play a poetry-writing minigame to win the heart of your favorite fictional character.

You know, normal high school stuff.

But even here the game is setting up its second-act reversal. After about an hour, you’ll reach a point where you’ll either spend a Sunday afternoon with Natsuski or Yuri (the game’s other two seemingly romanceable characters), while Sayori grows strangely apathetic and distant. Of course, being the aforementioned typical high school male, you can’t really do much, until—

That Sunday morning you decide to check on Sayori and, in the game’s first twist, she confesses that she has serious depression and has been hiding it from you as best she can because she doesn’t want you to worry about her. (Hence her lateness every morning—most of the time, she has trouble even getting out of bed.) You then invoke some variant of the “wow, you don’t seem like someone who could be depressed; why can’t you not be depressed; why don’t you try harder” trope, trying to be a good friend while also being an incredibly bad one, in vogue with how fictional characters in this mold—typical high school males—usually respond to this situation. By all means, the game appears to be setting you up for that ancient and storied “save the depressed person with love” plot.

But then comes the big moment, the point that, despite DDLC’s later stumbles, elevates its representation of depression by turning that trope on its head. After your Sunday date, you see Sayori again, and the game gives you a choice. This character is seriously depressed, to the point where every piece of her dialogue is motioning towards suicide. And you can either tell her that you love her, or that she’ll always be your dearest friend.

Which choice do you make?

I played DDLC with a friend who’d already finished it, and at this point I asked which choice would lead to Sayori not killing herself. I hadn’t given the game enough credit, and I expected that choice to be meaningful.

It’s not.

No matter which option you pick, Sayori hangs herself the following morning.

Doki Doki Literature Club is not an actual dating sim. It’s an entirely linear narrative that, despite a clear affinity for its genre, deconstructs some of its worst aspects. Here, it trains its gaze on a trope I mentioned a few paragraphs above: the idea of “saving” a depressed person with shallow love, and it tears it down.

Despite the game’s stumbles in its final act—it does actually allow you to keep Sayori, Yuri, and Natsuki alive if you play to certain points, restart, and (directedly) mess with a couple of game files, slightly cheapening the authenticity of its depiction of depression—that moment is special. First, it’s something only a game can pull off, because only a game can present a choice as if it should be meaningful and then hammer you with its meaninglessness. Second, it demonstrates—through both the choice itself and the surrounding dialogue—that it actually understands how depression and mental illness work. There’s no easy pathway out, no quick route to salvation. That the one avenue to keeping Sayori alive involves gearing all of your efforts around her for the game’s first act—showing some real care and actually building a legitimate relationship—in truth seems closer to the mark than most fictional media ever comes.

And third, games just don’t do this that often. While I have yet to play Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a game from earlier this year that also reportedly presented a nuanced and well-made view of mental illness, Doki Doki Literature Club might actually be one of the most narratively ambitious games I’ve ever played. Not because of its hit-and-miss metanarrative gambits, nor the loftiness or thematic weight of its storytelling, but because it takes on a serious, misrepresented real-world issue—depression—and comes really, really close to doing it justice.

If more games are going to try and tell important, meaningful stories, this would be an excellent place to start.