Chapter Text
My name is Tyler Amicus. I was always very into video games, but I didn’t like that many horror games. I was talking with my work friends about games one day when one of them brought up a game called Doki Doki Literature Club. I looked into it and, on the surface, it looked like a cutesy little dating sim, but it wasn’t listed as one; instead, it was listed as a psychological horror game, and that peaked my interest.
I started playing it, and the first thing that confused me was the warning that popped up.
“This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed.”
I started a new game and immediately became attached to the girl known as Monika. She had this sort of aura that drew me in. Then weird things started happening. It eventually resulted in Monika deleting everything but herself and the classroom. As she kept talking, I realized that she knew she was in a game. I couldn’t find out how to progress from there, but forums said I had to delete her character file. I didn’t want to do that because it felt as if I would kill her by doing that.
Then I saw something that said the game would count it as deleting her if you moved her file out of the game’s files and somewhere else. I moved her file to my desktop, and the game reacted as if I deleted her. The game continued without Monika, and eventually the other girls came back, but Monika wasn’t there. The game kept glitching until Monika returned and deleted everything as the credits rolled, singing her song she wrote for the player.
I sat there in disbelief. There’s no way that it could end like this. I played through the game multiple times after that, trying as hard as I could to get a happy ending without the girls dying or being deleted. I even ended up getting the secret letter from the developer at the end of the game, but I didn’t care. Eventually I gave up and deleted the game.
A few weeks later, I was tinkering around on my PC and noticed that the file monika.chr was surrounded by a bunch of other apps, like my gaming platforms, web browser, and messaging system. I cocked my head and moved the shortcuts back to the organization system I had them in, then moved monika.chr to the center of the desktop. The next day, the file had moved over near all my shortcuts in the open spot DDLC had left that I hadn’t filled in yet.
I decided to open the file and see what was causing this. I opened it up, but all I saw was code that I couldn’t understand... And then all the way at the bottom it said “Y or N?” I typed Y without thinking and there was an explosion of light and smoke, and I was thrown backwards by an unknown force.
I looked back at my computer and saw nothing damaged. My chair had fallen over from the force that threw me backwards, while the area near my door and printer was covered in smoke. It looked like someone threw a small smoke grenade. As I started to get up to walk over there, I heard a woman’s voice. “H-hello?”
I got up as fast as I could and tried to fan the smoke away. As it cleared, I saw where the voice came from. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by papers and miscellaneous objects and wearing a school uniform, was a young woman with striking emerald eyes and long reddish-brown hair. It was the girl I had tried to save a month ago.
Monika.