A quick rundown for those unfamiliar with Doki Doki Literature Club's plot and the way it breaks the fourth wall: The game is initially presented a straightforward romance visual novel whereby you are inducted into the titular club, and then are free to pursue the affections of one of several girls, Sayori, Yuri, Natsuki, and Monica, each representing different romantic archetypes. There you participate in poem writing exercises that will help impress your chosen interest, but eventually this cutesy veneer begins to break down as dialogue and messages hint at a darker tone, and the characters' poems take a similar bend.

By the end of the first "playthrough" you'll start becoming privy to each characters' particular mental afflictions, taking the form of severe depression or self-harming tendencies. Though you may start a romantic relationship with her, and promise to help her through her troubles, the first run ends when you find your childhood friend, Sayori, has died by suicide.

From here the game "restarts" and begins again as if Sayori was never part of it. As it plays on the game begins to become corrupted from her absence, and other characters begin to act more erratic, performing extreme forms of their previous self-harming behavior and acting incredibly aggressive. Doki Doki Literature Club finally ends after each of these girls is picked off in gruesome ways, and Monica, the last girl left, reveals it was all a ploy from her to get you, the player, not the character, to love her. By manipulating system files you can get her to finally remove herself from the game, and restart as if she never existed, showing you the final credits.

What was so effective here was misdirection of the cutesy, frivolous story it initially seems to be and the dark tale that Doki Doki Literature Club ends up telling. But DDLC is hardly alone in the way it combines the cute and the disturbing. Rather than seeing the game in opposition to its medium, it might be more useful to see the ways that it is part of that ongoing conversation.