Screenshots & trailers
What players say
Why the number is what it is: aspect mentions counted across 450 sampled Steam reviews (437 positive / 13 negative), recent and most-helpful. Plain keyword counting, fully reproducible; nothing here is written by a machine.
What positive reviews talk about
- Story & writing22% mention it
What negative reviews complain about
Negative reviews don't converge on specific aspects.
Satisfaction by hours played
Same score, different games: see how sentiment holds up the longer people play.
Under 5h
94%
217 reviews
5-15h
100%
200 reviews
15-40h
100%
24 reviews
Review sentiment over time
Weekly positive-review rate (green) and review volume (bars). Dashed lines mark significant patches; the amber line is the start of the current scoring window. Hover the dots to see what drove a dip or a jump.
How this score was computed
The VGC Score is a weighted blend on a press-comparable 0-100 quality scale. Steam approval rates are first calibrated (95% positive on Steam ≈ 89.5 quality, since Steam approval skews high). Press and tracked creator reviews each count ~2x a player review and share one cap against player evidence (creator buy/skip calls pool into an approval rate, calibrated like Steam approval); all-time sentiment is capped and halved (it's context, not verdict); reviews of the current build carry the most weight when a fresh patch anchors the window; and a 'typical game' prior keeps small samples from pegging the scale. Because press reviews and Metacritic user aggregates describe the launch build, their weight decays as the game ages (3-year half-life after a 1-year grace). That's how a game that launched rough can outgrow its old reception once updates win players over. Reviews under 2h playtime (the refund window), non-Steam activations, and free copies are downweighted.
| Component | Positive | Quality (0-100) | Weight (pseudo-reviews) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Press reviews (OpenCritic) | – | 87 | 3 |
| All-time Steam reviews | 96% | 92 | 1356 |
| Metacritic user ratings | – | 87 | 98 |
| Post-patch Steam reviews (trust-weighted) | 96% | 91 | 922 |
| Calibration prior (typical game) | – | 72 | 50 |
Scoring window: last 30 days (no significant patch detected) · 300 reviews sampled · 2635 total reviews in window · weighted 176.2 up / 3.5 down · computed 2h ago · full methodology →
Press & Creators reviews (13)
Individual verdicts from outlets we track: scored reviews first, most trusted outlets first among them. The small badge is each outlet's trust score: how well its scoring history aligns with players.
- 95
“Don’t underestimate Doki Doki Literature Club! Whether sensitive to the subject or not, this game hurts. Dan Salvato manages to give so much personality, so much life to sprites, that you’ll perceive them as people, empathize or even associate them with someone you’ve known or heard of. And seeing the slow, agonizing nightmare he’s prepared for them (and for you) is painful.”
read full review ↗ - 87
“Doki Doki Literature Club is a visual novella that masterfully manages to creep up on you, shatter the 4th wall with a sledgehammer and land it on your unsuspecting face.”
read full review ↗ - 85
“Doki Doki Literature Club is a mind boggling and hard hitting horror game that takes tried and tested formulas of both visual novels and dating sims and turns them on their heads. The themes and story pack a punch, and stayed with me long after I had finished playing. It may require commitment from some to get through but the reward for those who stick it is more than worth it”
read full review ↗ - 20
“Doki Doki Literature Club is free and I feel slightly uncomfortable being so critical of it. However, it also demands over four hours of your time. We all have backlogs of games we’ve already payed for and yet haven’t found the time to play. Go and play one of them instead. Doki Doki Literature Club isn’t worth your time.”
read full review ↗ - 80
“The first hour or so are intentionally insufferable. Some of the best horror takes its time establishing what’s normal, because it has to show you what it’s going to break. Without normal, you wouldn’t know what’s weird. Without real, you wouldn’t know what’s surreal. Without victims, you wouldn’t know what’s monstrous. Without the anime dating sim, you wouldn’t know Doki Doki Literature Club.”
read full review ↗ - 95
“Doki Doki Literature Club is a daring game that sets itself up to be something ordinary to intentionally subvert a player's expectations. Even knowing this, the narrative is solid and engaging enough that I'd recommend anyone that can endure a cute dating sim for a couple of hours to try this game out.”
read full review ↗ - 90
“Funny, sad, and with the sharpest teeth, Doki Doki Literature Club is one of the most pleasant surprises of 2017.”
read full review ↗ - 90
“Team Salvato have created an interesting and very creative title. A visual novel's UI is often fairly simple, but the player is offered more control than they may first realise.”
read full review ↗ - 55
“A horror game disguised as a dating sim. First couple of hours are boring and written poorly to the degree of being hard to digest for me, then things get better, but the story is still shallow and the substance plays second fiddle to the form. [01/2018, p.61]”
- 85
“Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! is both a celebration of visual novels and a deep dive into the potential of interactive fiction. This updated version introduces new content that continues to weaponize the game's mastery over the visual novel format to land even more emotional gut punches.”
read full review ↗ - 70
“This game is an interesting one which presents as a common "visual novel" game but in the end presents a totally different approach as the game progress. In the end it feels very mixed with some aspects where the game done well but in other ones it doesn't.”
read full review ↗ - 90
“Doki Doki Literature Club! is totally free and one of the best visual novel ever made.”
read full review ↗
Indie Games Devel
GameGrin
CDavis_Games
Geeks Under Grace
RPG Fan
Readers Gambit
CD-Action
GamingTrend
MeriStation
Multiplayer.it…and 1 more tracked reviews.
Patch history
- DDLC v1.1.1 UpdateApr 15, 2018