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PayPalDoki Doki Literature Club [Official Site, itch.io] is a cute dating-sim where you join a literature club filled with beautiful girls. Except, it's not that at all. Underneath the saccharine pink and typical tropes of the genre, something dark slowly emerges and coalesces into a nightmare.
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The game starts innocently with your childhood friend, Sayori, convincing you to join the small literature club. You quickly meet the other three members who fall into familiar dating-sim archetypes. You court the girl of your choice by "writing poems" that appeal to her. Pay attention to your choices and what the girls tell you. As the game progresses the cute facade slowly cracks and it becomes more unsettling. Heed the disclaimers if you are disturbed easily. The atmosphere is effective at making you uneasy.
The website lists the playtime between 4-5 hours and there are a modest number of CGs to collect. It's the first game by Team Salvato, a new studio focused on storytelling and creativity in games. DDLC, as it's commonly abbreviated, was released on September 22 and is available for whatever price you choose on itch.io and Steam. Steam doesn't list Linux as one of the platforms, but the download from itch.io bundles the Windows and Linux builds together. The game is built on the Ren'Py engine and worked flawlessly for me.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Not exactly what I have in mind for my first video game, but now I'm intrigued since the trailer makes no mention of the horror aspect.
Last edited by Salvatos on 18 October 2017 at 12:58 pm UTC
According to this it is not.
I only did one playthrough of CUPID (which is also free), but that's the one visual novel I could relate to this. From what I recall it gets a good deal more disturbing and graphic than DDLC, and it's more consistently gloomy. It doesn't have a dating sim veneer, so it's still rather different, and the choices you make aren't about whom you become romantically involved with. It does have nudity, though.
Last edited by Salvatos on 18 October 2017 at 10:19 pm UTC
Spoiler, click me
The Higurashi games are similar, but I've played only the first one. It's heavy on the "novel" side, and if I remember correctly, you don't have agency to make decisions. A whole franchise was created from those.
While I haven't yet played this game yet, there are some other pretty well made visual novels. Have a look at Pyre (it's marketed as an RPG, but it's pretty much a visual novel with RPG and action elements), or at Loren, the Amazon Princess (again a visual novel with RPG elements marketed as an RPG - beware, this has lots of fan-service, especially if you enable the "suggestive content" option, and also the story is rather bad at the beginning, but quickly gets better once the "just throw dozens of new characters at the player" phase is over).