They are tucked within the broader package of DDLC+ and gated behind multiple playthroughs of the main story.
The thing is… the Side Stories don’t exist in isolation.
Their depictions feel like statements of genuine understanding for the struggles against depression, anxiety, intrusive thoughts, or trauma. Taken on their own, these snippets offer gentler portrayals of mental illness. Side Stories comprise half a dozen new stories that explore the origins of the Literature Club and the relationships between the four girls in it before the player came onto the scene. The game may be widely loved, but that doesn’t make it blameless.ĭDLC+ Side Stories were an opportunity for redemption – an opportunity grasped at but not quite reached. On one hand, that’s part of what makes DDLC so memorable on the other, it finds a home within the broader social contexts of stigmatization and stereotyping of mental illness. Heightened as the depictions of mental illness are for most of the player’s time with the game, they lack the nuance to seem truly earnest. To the developers’ credit, they try to justify the extreme portrayals through the game’s fourth wall-breaking meta-awareness of its constructedness, but the shocks are too shocking. Its cutesy aesthetic belies a troubling narrative that plays up mental health issues for shock value. Not for nothing is DDLC considered a psychological thriller. Instead, the new DDLC+ Side Stories play out as straightforward visual novel narratives, with you as the player providing all of the discomfiting undercurrent. The recent re-release adds hours of new content that fills in the narrative background without trying to repeat past tricks. Anyone who played the original version can surely attest to its ability to disturb by subverting convention and playing with the fourth wall. This article contains spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club Plus (DDLC+ ) and its Side Stories.ĭoki Doki Literature Club Plus! is unsettling.
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