Yahtzee Croshaw credited as playing...
Yahtzee
- Yahtzee: So if you're still here, Doki Doki Upskirt Club! begins as a bog-standard anime dating sim and keeps the act going for a surprisingly long time. You are Faceless Generic Japanese High School Boy-Man Creature, and through some contrived circumstances, meet a small group of anime girls - I believe the collective noun is a "jailbait" of anime girls - covering all the common fetish bases, who all instantly fall in love with you at first glance, or possibly from the sound of your footsteps coming down the hall, and you must make branching decisions to court one of the girls in the hope of helping her overcome her inevitable massive sexual repression and get some lovely kisses and/or plow her up and down the garden path, depending on what specific kind of visual novel we're dealing with. And you do have to enjoy visual novels to some extent to get the best effect from the game; it's like the Spec Ops: The Line thing: you have to like war shooters so that you can play the war shooter long enough to get to the bit where it punches you in the face for liking war shooters. So it's doing the visual novel thing: you have extra scenes with the girls you're actively pursuing, you could accidentally lean on the "Skip" button for fifty lines and not miss shit because the dialogue is 90% flustered reactions to sexual arousal. But then, some odd details start popping up: the one girl off-handedly mentions she's manically depressed, another turns out to collect knives and secretly cuts herself, and you think, "Okay, all these girls have serious mental health issues, but hell, still no worse than characters in other visual novels I've played! You've got to be a little fucked in the head to enjoy guzzling cum that much. Hey, if you're surprised by fucked-up things happening in visual novels, then you haven't played very many." The real turning point comes when the depressed girl commits suicide; that's the definite point of bollock descent into icy water. Although, her depression had been portrayed with a slightly uncomfortable authenticity, so it wasn't creepy in an enjoyable psychological horror kind of way; it was just really fucking sad. It happens regardless of what choices you pick, which, in itself, might be an effective premise for a game about depression: constantly reliving the same few days trying to save her and failing every time because her problems are too deep-seated to be fixed just because you accidentally felt her up on day three. Anyway, after that, the game restarts, except this time, the dead character is mysteriously absent, no one remembers them, and your old saves don't work, and I guess that sounds pretty creepy in a "walking into a familiar bathroom with all the mirrors covered up" kind of way.
- Yahtzee: A while back, I wanted to make the point that there seemed to be an awful lot of anime dating sims sprouting up on Steam the way looters show up on a ruined battlefield, and I illustrated this point with a screenshot of the first one I saw on the listing, which happened to be Doki Doki Literature Club!, and the response in the comments was like I'd accidentally rested my beer on the gravestone of an abuse victim. "Hohohohoho! If only you knew what you'd done!" sang my correspondence. What? What have I done? "Ooh, we can't tell you. You have to play it for yours - " Parody game, got it, don't care, now get off my fucking lawn. Then I started noticing a couple of words floating around the Steam tags and the reviews, words like "Psychological Horror" and "Disturbing", and I was like, "Oh, right; one of those Five Nights at Freddy's arrangements, a game designed not to be played and enjoyed, but to be reacted to on a stream or hilarious YouTube video, 'cos God knows it's hard to amuse 500 baboons at once without investing in a banana truck." But no one could stop banging on about it, so eventually, I thought, "Fuck it; it's free", and having played through it, I can now confidently state that free was the perfect price for it. I don't intend that as the kick in the miniskirt it sounds like; it's just that it feels more like a concept game than a complete product. And besides, it goes out of its way to not drop the façade of being a bog-standard anime dating sim all over the store page, so if they actually charged money for this clever prank, they risk first, the class-action lawsuit from a platoon of the world's most depressing men, and second, the cost of having the courtroom fumigated.