Doki Doki Literature Club! (DDLC) is a 2017 freeware visual novel developed by American independent game studio Team Salvato for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The game was initially distributed through itch.io, and later became available on Steam. The story is told from the perspective of a high school student who reluctantly joins the school’s literature club on the insistence of his childhood best friend, and is given the option to romantically pursue three of its four female members. Doki Doki Literature Club! features a non-traditional plot structure with multiple endings and unlockable cutscenes with each of the main characters. Although the game initially appears to be a lighthearted dating simulator, it is in fact a metafictional psychological horror game that extensively breaks the fourth wall. Wikipedia
Research exclusive to this game
Spearman, Peter. “Doki Doki Literature Club: Cute Girls, Violence, and Your Computer.” PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research 5, no. 1 (2022).
Research that includes this game in its sample
Anderson, Sky LaRell. “Portraying mental illness in video games: exploratory case studies for improving interactive depictions.” Loading 13, no. 21 (2020): 20-33.
Blount, Tom, and Callum Spawforth. “Pathos in Play: How Game Designers Evoke Negative Emotions.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.06799 (2019).
Patterson, Christopher B. “Making Queer Asiatic Worlds: Performance and Racial Interaction in North American Visual Novels.” American Literature 94, no. 1 (2022): 17-47.
Travers, Sean. “Perpetrator Trauma in Video Games: Dan Salvato’s Doki Doki Literature Club and Toby Fox’s Undertale.” In Trauma in American Popular Culture and Cult Texts, 1980-2020, pp. 165-196. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022.