Doki Doki Literature Club Shows Not Everything Should Be Meta

Beware spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club, and UnderTale

A bunch of friends recently sat me down to play Doki Doki Literature Club. If you have no idea what a Doki Doki Literature club is, it's an easy way to spend four hours reinforcing to yourself how Visual Novels aren't really for you.

In all seriousness, Doki Doki Literature Club is a free Visual Novel available through Steam, and it's what all your favourite YouTubers are probably over-reacting to right now if they aren't losing their collective minds playing Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy. It's quirky, it's colourful, and if you want my honest opinion, sniffing its own farts.

I was on New Grounds back in the day, I played those flash dating sims, and all the Visual Novels I end up getting recommended play out pretty similarly. You pick whichever girl you think is worth romancing based on still, lifeless images and then make a series of decisions that reinforce your dedication to an anime girl JPEG. You usually play as lacking personality protagonist A, who you're supposed to project yourself onto so he has as few defining traits as possible. His inner monologue is your window into the world as he describes the things that weren't in the media team's budget to display on screen.

Safe to say, this isn't a medium for me.

I play enough JRPGs though, and a lot of them incorporate the story-telling mechanics of a visual novel. Maybe it's anchoring bias, but when the JPEGS and Textboxes end, there's still some part of my brain nagging at me that there should be some form of interaction here. I guess my issue with VNs is that they present me with the carboat dilemma; Sure, a carboat is cool, but even if you could afford one, you'd probably want them separate anyway. on account of how easy it is to just park your car and then rent a boat. Probably cheaper too. And the car boat will inevitably be both a subpar boat and car.

Let's hope that there's never a Steam and Amazon Kindle merger.

To Doki Doki Literature club's credit, there are these poetry writing sections that actually do reveal a little about the girls and their characters. It's not much, but it's something to stimulate the brain after some mindless clicking.

So after you decide who is best girl and you trigger all the flags, you end up exploring that character's route.

At the midpoint is where the game actually pissed me off a little, as you're forced to watch the suicide of one of the characters after sitting through flavour-text written by someone who only has a mild idea of what clinical depression looks like.

After that, we reach a microcosm of the current indie game zeitgeist. The breaking of the fourth wall. The moment the Visual Novel becomes self-aware, and the characters within reveal that they know they're abstractions within a computer program.

I commend your efforts, DDLC, you tried very hard. And I know I shouldn't be mad at you. You're a free product. You're everything wonderful about the indie scene. Dan Salvato, you're doing good work man. Keep it up.

But you have to earn your wink at the camera.

I'll tell you straight that Undertale is great, but there's something that grated me about being punished for playing an RPG like an RPG. However, Undertale at least had something to say. When you confront Sans at the end and he tells you how LVL actually stands for "Level of Violence" and EXP stands for "Execution Points", it's a telling moment. When you get to the end of the game, and Flowee let's you reset the events of the story, you, the player, become the true antagonist of the game. It's a clever and fun subversion.

And upon completing DDLC, the lack of this statement, the lack of this punch at the end, is what got me. Maybe it's how I didn't connect or care for any of the characters. Maybe it's just the obnoxious way the VN tried being 3spooky5me using only the fact that it was a visual novel aware that it was a visual novel. Maybe it was the surreal way being hyper-aware that I wasn't interacting with characters but pieces of data on a hard drive yanked any punch out of the character deaths or Monika's manipulation. Sayori manages to be the only interesting one, by being the deleted data trying it's hardest to avoid being wiped. There are some cool touches, like how their character files are actually deleted from the source folder. The blue screen gag, I will say, was at least the one that got me. I appreciated that. Exploiting my fears about Windows 10 doing what Windows 10 does, you earned the spooks there.

I just felt it all a little redundant afterwards.

There's an alternate ending where if you view all the optional scenes via either save-scumming or fresh installs, Sayori does thank you for trying to make each of the girls happy. Perhaps if this was the ending I ended up viewing, I might not have found the experience so obnoxious. But as is... DDLC didn't leave a good taste in my mouth.

There's something a little off-putting about these digital girls all being head over heels in love with you. There's something off-putting about investing time into getting to know these characters, only to have the experience intruded upon by the horror elements and self-congratulatory spooks. There's something off-putting about putting garbage text on screen and expecting me to do anything other than roll my eyes, because it's soooooo clever that you managed to fake the script being corrupted, Dan. And Christ, that music loop is repetitive as all hell.

Do I recommend Doki Doki Literature Club? If you're into the whole too-meta-for-it's-own-good VN thing, yes. It's four hours worth of free content, and even more if you do a couple fresh installs for multiple playthroughs.

If you aren't into Visual Novels, if you aren't into things obnoxiously breaking the fourth wall, if you kind of just wanted a fun slice of life Dating Sim, if you have any taste in psychological horrors at all... Maybe give it a pass. After all, Newgrounds hasn't gone anywhere and I'm sure you'll find something infinitely more satisfying there.

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What Steven Universe Means To Me

Steven Universe didn't come into my life at a particularly difficult point. I wasn't looking for a new show to watch, I wasn't in a particularly difficult state of mind, I wasn't in one of the many dark periods of my life. In fact, I hadn't heard much about the show until I saw JelloApocalypse's video. While that entertained me, I was still resistant. The eventual tipping point was when my sister showed me the clip of Garnet singing Stronger Than You, and I made up my mind to give Steven Universe a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months later.

I was sitting in an exam I was underprepared for, supremely stressed for, and sleep deprived for. It was open book, so I had all my notes scattered on the desk in front of me, along with the question paper, but then I had a panic attack. Being who I am and dealing with the problems I deal with, this cascaded and triggered a couple of lingering suicidal thoughts, and it was a blow to my self-esteem that would usually take a long time to recover from. I was on the verge of sobbing in the exam venue and I can't tell you how awful and embarrassing that felt.

But something magical happened. I closed my eyes, still struggling to breath a little, and in my head I started singing Here Comes A Thought.

Here comes a thought that might alarm me
What someone said, and how it harmed me
Something I did that failed to be charming
Things that I said are suddenly swarming
And oh, I'm losing sight
I'm losing touch
All these little things seem to matter so much
That they confuse me
That I might lose me

And things started to be a little more okay. I knew the situation I was in was at the very least partly my fault. I hadn't prepared enough, I didn't sleep enough, I didn't manage my time well enough. The heartache I felt for letting myself down was sincerely unbearable. Nevertheless, I persisted.

Take a moment, remind myself 
To take a moment to find myself
Take a moment to ask myself
If this is how I fall apart

This part of the song never fails to well up a little dread in me. Being asked to be introspective and assess the damage, to take a moment and instead of dissociating like I usually would, to find me in all this mess. To ask myself, if this is this how I fall apart?

But it's not, but it's not, but it's not, but it's not, but it's not
It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay
I've got nothing, got nothing, got nothing, got nothing to fear
I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.

And it was just a thought, just a thought, just a thought, just a thought
It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay
We can watch, we can watch, we can watch, we can watch them go by
From here, from here, from here.

This is not how I fall apart. I am not lost in all the chaos, I am right here. I might have done something less than charming, and all these little worries might swarm and try overwhelm me. But I have nothing to fear.

The suicidal thoughts? That's all they are. Just thoughts. And thoughts pass. They might come back, but they pass. They might pass like a kidney stone, but they will pass.

The repetition of the words "It's okay" is what makes this part of the chorus have such a punch. Whenever you're comforting someone else, you have to try convince them that no matter the issue, it's not the end of the world. No matter how large their mistake, it is going to be okay. And in my mind, singing this to myself, and saying this to myself, makes the difference between a long period of dissociation and apathy, and a recovery.

And this little coping mechanism, this tool on my belt for when life does eventually get hard, came from a show about talking space rocks who solve most of their problems in song.

Steven Universe is a show that means the world to me. It has characters I connected with, songs that struck a chord with me, stories that made me laugh and cry, and little details that fill me with glee. My favourite microcosm of the show comes from Season 1 Episode 2, where Steven and his dad are bringing the light canon to the gems. Steven puts on his dad's CD, and while Greg feels sort of like his work wasn't all that great or important, Steven treats his dad's music like it's the most amazing thing in the world. A real and sincere reverence for something Greg has done, which might be small and insignificant to the world at large.

As a creator, you always hope that the things you make end up impacting someone. That someone appreciates what you've done and the time, effort and heart you put into it. No one sees the entirety of the race you ran, most just get to see you when you finish, and to them, all that matters was whether you did well or not. To see sincere appreciation for your every centimeter of ground you traversed, even if the result was mediocre, is a powerful thing.

As an LGBTQ person, being openly bisexual can often feel like a really big and important part of you gets treated as a thing to ignore or hide or dart around. It's not often that you get to see queer people be unashamedly queer and be genuinely unphased by people who would see us undone.

Seeing Garnet be an unashamed fusion in a world where we're told to stop holding our partner's hands in public, in a world where even the slightest representation gets labeled SJW propaganda, where life as a queer person can just be really fucking hard... Seeing Garnet being so happy and unashamed, even as Peridot tells her how she doesn't need to be a fusion in public, or always be a fusion, is everything.

The cast of Steven Universe is predominantly female. While gems don't really have sex, most are female presenting. Their feminine coding and use of she/her/her pronouns imply female gendering. And that's huge. My favourite little detail is how Stevonnie is always referred to as they/them/their.

I've never been much good at describing how or why Steven Universe ended up being so impactful. The show has its shortcomings and trying to explain to people why it's so worth persisting through is genuinely tough. Segments other people find intolerable I still get enjoyment out of.

How do you explain to someone that something is just worth their time? How do you ask someone to take on faith that this silly little kids show is a mature exploration of character and gender? How do you tell someone that this cartoon explores war crimes and the complexity of how even the most beloved and genuine people can still do hurtful and horrible things? How do I say that I cried with Steven when he heard his mom's voice for the first time? How do I explain the way the show tackles someone escaping the cycle of an abusive relationship? Or how one can love a person who never reciprocated that love long after they're gone?

Steven Universe means a lot to me. Steven Universe means a lot. I fell in love with the show and it taught me a bit about how to love myself. It gave me a way to cope with some of my shortcomings, and hammered into me that my mistakes are fleeting and that I should forgive myself when I mess up. It put a couple songs in my heart and I'm always a little more chipper for it.

Steven Universe means a lot to me. And I might have ended up a less functional person had I not watched it. Maybe it won't mean that much to you, but I do hope you get to watch it, and I hope it instills at least some small bit of the warmth it instilled in me.

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Let's have a chat about game diffiulty

I’ve been ruminating on game difficulty some. Whilst I don’t want to go into the Cuphead debacle, I’ll concede that some valid questions were asked and we owe it to ourselves as consumers and to the game industry to try and come to a consensus, or at least to figure out what the mainstream and niche answers are.

But I’ve heard the sentiment echoed here and there that difficulty isn’t accessible, and I don’t think that’s true by default. Challenge is one of the core aesthetics of play, and difficult challenges often yield more rewards, especially if they’re fun to complete. Nothing feels better than overcoming a tough obstacle, and knowing that you only did it because you became better as a player.

But I do think that Cuphead’s difficulty does raise an important question that I think we definitely should be asking;

How do we make difficult games accessible?

Here’s a quick refresher; Arcade games were hard. They had to be in order to earn your coins. That difficulty ended up being translated to home consoles in their first iterations, and a whole generation of gamers grew up with tough games just being the norm.

Today, tough as nails games are niche. You still get the odd stand-out here and there, but games are easier, and as a result, more accessible than ever. And unless you’re playing on original hardware, even older tough as nails games are much more accessible thanks to save-states via emulators, although there’s certainly an elitist mentality in the gaming community that frowns upon the usage thereof.

But here’s my main point; Tough games can be accessible, they just have to be worth the challenge.

Touhou, Dark Souls, Osu, Hotline Miami, Shovel Knight, almost the entirety of the SNES library… These are some of the toughest games but are all so fun and rewarding that you have to ask, are we just not approaching difficulty correctly? Challenge is fun. Overcoming adversity is what’s part of why videogames are fun to play.

I think that the difficulty curve of games isn’t too often talked about. Creating a satisfying difficulty curve in a videogame is an art; If it’s too steep, the challenge might ramp up before a player can adjust and needlessly frustrate them. If it’s too shallow, the game might feel like it plateaus, which makes what is meant to be a challenge an exercise in monotony. Most games also have design oversights that can introduce spikes. The infamous Barrel of Sonic 3 & Knuckles comes to mind. A difficulty curve also changes as a player grows in skill. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Dark Souls veteran who still thinks the Asylum demon is a tough fight.

Nailing a difficulty curve is the difference between a game that gets completed and favourably viewed retrospectively and a game that gets lost to obscurity.

While Cuphead seems to be a game that, for the most part, handles its difficulty curve competently, the entry barrier is also a tad thick. Each game has a skill floor and a skill ceiling. The skill floor is the minimum amount of skill required to produce competent play, and the skill ceiling is the maximum skill one can acquire. Usually, any given game wants to have a low skill floor, and a high skill ceiling. Make the skill ceiling too low and mastering the game becomes unsatisfying. Make the skill floor too high and the price of entry is too high for most casual players.

One aspect I think a lot of developers don’t consider is screen real-estate; The more you fill up the screen with, the more information you give to the player, the more likely sensory overload is to occur. Admittedly, this is usually more of a problem with Bullet Hell and Shoot ‘Em Ups than with any other genre, but I’ve seen it occur within platformers. Any given clip of high-level play in Touhou looks like a rave and an acid trip all mixed into one. High-level Osu can be just as daunting. But if you give the player too much visual information before they’ve reached a certain skill level, you’ve effectively neutered their ability to play. If you don’t have practice reacting that quickly to that many on-screen objects, your brain might do a derp and you could make a mistake that you’d usually avoid. Snoman brought up the idea of how poor use of screen real-estate can actually lead to a detrimental experience in a game, and introducing too many elements at once can definitely cause a player to leave a game unfinished.

Inaccessible difficulty can come from another place; Poor frame rate and sloppy controls. If your game feel is awkward and clunky, you’ve added a new dimension of challenge, and PC gamers know how awful playing at less than desirable frame rates can be (although I still think the standard should be 60 frames per second and not 30 frames per second). The common example brought up for control is coyote time or the ghost jump. The extra few frames after leaving a platform in which you can jump. Some platformers extend the player’s collision box in order to achieve this. Others code a short timer, but either method creates the same result; responsive controls.

Long iteration cycles also come to mind. This comes in two parts, the time between the fail state and a point where new progress can be made, and the time taken for a fail state to reset. Both should always be as short as possible. Re-treading old ground too often is never good, and lengthy death animations that boot you to the main menu can just find the nearest garbage bin to climb into. It’s cheap difficulty. It’s artificial.

Telegraphing is also important. Telegraphing is the act of conveying information to the player, whether it be their current objective, or that an attack or obstacle is incoming. Nothing sucks more than a game with a bad case of “where the heck do I go”, and being hit by something off-screen you could never see coming just is poor game design.

Here’s another thing developers might not consider; Effective teaching tools.

How you convey the ins and outs of your game’s mechanics are the way that it teaches the player. I’m not talking about Hbomberguy’s play-conditioning, although it certainly forms part of this. I’m talking about the effectiveness of your tutorials, the resources available, the way lessons are taught. Older games had extensive manuals, the original Final Fantasy famously has an 80 page guide to get you through the first half of the game. Dark Souls is an interesting case in that while there are in-game tutorials, the community itself is the teaching tool. Guys like Vageta311 release tutorials using mined data, many players release build guides, there are hundreds of walkthroughs and of course, the notes on the ground from other players. Games don’t come with manuals anymore, so the way players are taught is essential in making a tough game more accessible.

While this is by no means comprehensive, other aspects to difficulty might just be quality of life; clearly visible boss healthbars, level progress meters, recommended level before attempting warnings, cancel-outs from combos. Stuff that might make the game easier, but also just make it that much more accessible to play. The idea isn’t that you rig the game against the player; you should be giving them a wall that you want them to conquer, even if it is by repeatedly mashing their heads against that wall until it falls over.

From this, I think in order to create a game that is tough but accessible, I think the following conditions should be met:

• There should be a satisfying difficulty curve
• There should be a relatively low skill floor, but a high skill ceiling
• Effective use of screen real-estate
• Solid frame rate and tight controls
• Short iteration cycles
• Clear telegraphing
• Little quality of life additions
• And just a fun game

Fun is subjective, but players will power through any game if the aesthetics are pleasing and the gameplay is fun. Tough isn’t necessarily inaccessible. We just have to be smart about the way we create difficulty and resist the temptation to be cheap.

If nothing else, just include a guide on how to get barrels to move up and down, please.

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