First of all, thank you.

Thank you so much, Team Salvato, for making this game. I haven't felt this genuinely satisfied since I finished Shadow of the Colossus for the first time. Yes, really. I mean it. Your stupid little game about some candy-haired, anime schoolgirls and their book club tea parties turned out to be one of the most heartfelt, suspenseful and gut-wrenching gaming experiences I've had in years. There's so much I could discuss, but I feel I should keep it simple for now.

Going in, I knew by the way that everyone was praising it to high heaven without giving any details that this would be something special. Even though I've played games in a similar vein before, yours still managed to keep me guessing right up until the very end. Even when I thought I had figured out what was going on, the game always had just one more surprise up its sleeve. It made me care about a cast of characters that - at first glance - I wouldn't give two ticks about. Heck, even the minigame where you have to make a 20 word poem by picking from a random list of words ended up winning me over.

I must confess that there are some things I don't like, however. It takes an agonisingly long time to get going, and hearing one or two very similar songs throughout most of it without a break was irritating, even if both of these things are done on purpose. It could have been worse, though, and I wish you luck with your future endevours.

I'll be sure to throw you some cash your way, if I can. You earned it.

I haven't felt this way since I played Undertale. It's a really deep game, DDLC.

I must confess that there are some things I don't like, however. It takes an agonisingly long time to get going, and hearing one or two very similar songs throughout most of it without a break was irritating, even if both of these things are done on purpose. It could have been worse, though, and I wish you luck with your future endevours.

I'm not so sure about that. It felt like a bit under an hour of reading before "HOLY SHIT!!" - but I really, really don't think that the power of those moments would have been so profound without that buildup.

It wasn't just setting cutesy, friendly expectations. It was also building up such a logical origin for the first event that you can't just laugh it off as being "Ridiculous-funny horror bullshit" like you can with say, a giant holding a twenty-bladed chainsaw.

I could maybe understand being bored if you have a slower reading speed than me though. I tend to somewhat speed-read visual novels.

I thought it was shallow, poorly presented, easily expected and not scary. I don't get how people like this. The only good thing is Monika at the end. The game really is agonizingly slow too. I have played long visual novels and never felt like skipping so much before. Going over the same scenes again with only minor differences and non-creepy text in a scary font was really bad. The glitch stuff was also boring since it really added nothing except the fact that things were falling apart.

OK. So it's been some time since I made that first post. It should be noted that I wrote that right after I finished the game. It was late. I was tired. I still stand by the majority of what I said, even if the comarisons to Shadow of the Colossus might have been a bit of a stretch. I guess why this resonated with me so much is because in this day and age, genuine surprise is almost nonexistant.

We all know what 'rosebud' means, who Luke Skywalker's father is and what Joe Schlubb media star had for breakfast. If you don't know those things now, chances are someone or something on the internet will be more than happy to tell you. Anything that manages to break through all that becomes special. It'll stick with you. Even if the product itself isn't spectacular, you might just view it differently, like I do.

Sure, Doki Doki Literature Club borrows tricks learned from IMSCARED, Pony Island and so-on, but it applied them in a way that I felt was new enough to warrant merit. I should also mention that I kind of wanted something like this to come along for a while now. Visual Novels are kind of a guilty pleasure of mine, and the Dating Sim sub-genre in particular often has this surreal awkwardness about it, that I feel could lead to great horror... though whether this game is an example of that is subjective.

I'd still find it hard to recommend to someone who doesn't like this sort of thing already, and I do agree that it has its problems. But when you get down to it, you could do so much worse than this.