beautiful art, great music, meh characters and story. shock value: the game. natsuki best girl.

i have a silly attachment to this game, as it was the first horror game i was ever able to play in full (i am a pussy when it comes to scary games). that said i definitely have more criticisms than praise, and the score is only as high as it is because of that sentimentality.

the scares and twists are gimmicky and purely for shock value with very little to say beyond that. each character has one or two character traits and a "dark" twist with very little depth. the writing just feels very shallow to me. it almost entirely relies on the twist that it's not actually a dating sim, it's a HORROR GAME! the twist is ruined if you look at the steam page. it's not creative or even especially well-executed.

when it came out i saw a lot of people praising it as a unique, subversive, horror experience, or even a "deconstruction" of visual novels/dating sims. it's not. it is only interesting or subversive to a western audience who has little to no experience with those genres. horror visual novels and dating sims have been done a thousand times, there's nothing subversive about the simple act of making one. DDLC does nothing that hasn't been done before, better and with more heart.

the music is good though!

that's all for now.