![]() In this post -Undertale indie game market I am totally okay with more titles working in weird meta mechanics, and after playing 9999 games in visual novel engine Renpy the idea of messing with engine itself is very appealing to me. I love the idea of a standard cutesy dating sim quickly falling apart because one of the characters becomes self-aware, forced to watch her friends mysteriously fall in love with the main character while she tries to reach out to the player who she knows controls the whole world. I honestly think the game’s premise is excellent. All the shock and horror is there for very frivolous reasons, to the point of stringing the player along without much plot or character development, and the game is alarmingly callous in its depiction of physical violence and emotional trauma. I love a good emotional, edgy, violent experience as much as the next visual novel/anime fan (I cosplayed Mukuro from Danganronpa at Fanime this year, for crying out loud), and I certainly felt emotions, felt edges, and saw violence playing this damn game, but only in the most frustrating way imaginable. I probably sound like some old curmudgeon saying that a game was bad because it was violent and insensitive but even I have to draw the line somewhere. I’m here writing about Doki Doki Literature Club because it did evoke a huge response from me, but while my favorite visual novels challenged my notions of humanity and relationships, Doki Doki was an exercise in gratuitous discomfort and purely insensitive depictions of horror and mental illness. I’ve played my share of those too, and you won’t find me writing articles about them. However these are titles in an entire medium dominated by hordes of very cut-and-dry titles that feature trope-laden dating games and other silly content. It’s an interesting medium, existing somewhere between a book and a fully interactive game, that can lead to truly emotional, hard-hitting works when done correctly (see some of my past reviews on this blog back when it was still active). It’s also worth noting before we begin that some of my favorite works are visual novels.
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