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• 1 2023-11-29T16:03:18+00:00 Tanishq's Page 4 2 plain 2023-12-08T07:36:25+00:00 The visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club centers around the player's character, and his joining of his high school's literature club at the behest of his childhood friend, Sayori. Upon joining the club, he meets the other girls, Yuri, Monika, and Natsuki, and begins regular and daily club activities with them. However, as time goes on and your character learns more about the girls, you learn about their struggles. In the first playthrough, you learn about Sayori's and how she is incredibly depressed based on everything that's going on in her life. No matter what kind of path you try and take, you always reach the bad ending which ends with Sayori taking her own life. However, rather than be able to restart, upon finishing the first playthrough, the game corrupts your savefiles, forcing you to restart the game in a totally new version where Sayori is completely gone, and not a single character, including your own, remembers here. The game progresses like normal, but the exact same thing ends up happening to Yuri, and she also takes her own life at the end of the second playthrough. The game repeats the same process, erasing your saves and forcing you to start anew, In the third, and technically final playthrough, all the characters are there, but the game focuses more on Natsuki, as the player progresses through the story with her only to find Monika ends up interfering with the game itself and completely deleting Natsuki from the game, snapping her neck in the process. The gameplay is incredibly thought-provoking and confusing at the same time, and leaves many people with more questions than answers, but as someone who has played through the game many times, taking the important messages with me was my main focus after all these playthroughs. Sara Bowden, in her journal article about DDLC, makes the argument that "Though the game is a work of fiction, the emotions and reflections of the player prompted by the violent acts within are real – the player’s experiences of horror, fear and terror are visceral." The raw emotion the player will feel as they progress through the different acts of the game are overwhelming, and the developer encourages the player to take hold of that emotion and understand why they feel that way, to truly understand the struggle these characters are going through.