Doki Doki Literature Club!

Doki Doki Literature Club! begins as an apparently harmless visual novel about joining a high-school literature club, meeting charming characters, and writing poems. Team Salvato then proceeds to demonstrate that appearances can be spectacularly misleading. Beneath the cheerful presentation lies a psychological horror experience that plays with the conventions of visual novels, player expectations, and even the boundaries between game and interface. The characters gradually reveal much darker sides, while the story becomes increasingly unsettling as it progresses. Its clever use of genre conventions helped make it one of the most talked-about indie games of 2017. It is also excellent proof that joining a literature club can be considerably more dangerous than joining a football team.