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PaperclipPerfector  10hr ago (text post)   2125 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Censorship Report: Monika Wins

Engadget reports:

Google has removed popular game Doki Doki Literature Club! from the Play Store. According to Dan Salvato, who led its development team, and publisher Serenity Forge, Google told them the visual novel was removed because it violated its Terms of Service in its depiction of sensitive themes... Its free version, which came out first, has been downloaded at least 30 million times, while the paid “Plus” version has had at least one million downloads. The visual novel has repeatedly made Engadget’s lists of favorite games over the years.

Doki Doki Literature Club, typically abbreviated as DDLC for everyone's sanity, features a nameless and voiceless protagonist invited to the titular book club by childhood best friend and cheerful optimist Sayori. There, he meets the blunt and emotional Natsuki, the shy and dour Yuri, and the president of the club, Monika. Okay, you get the picture, this is a visual novel with an M17+ rating, is it just another one of those skeevy skirt-chaser simulators, pulled for the standard reasons?

... not quite.

[spoiler warning]

DDLC starts out looking like a shovelware relationship builder, but at the end of Act 1, Sayori's hanged herself, and then after a long moment with the protagonist trapped in a room with the corpse, the day resets, except there's only four members of the club now. There's no sign Sayori ever existed, and the game seems increasingly broken, with causality like 'who introduced the protagonist to the club' no longer needing or having answers. The other club members seem weirder, with Yuri's slightly gothy mannerisms have exaggerated to Charles Manson fangirl levels, up to and including stabbing herself to death. Natsuki goes from mild tsundere to making Evangelion's Asuka seem well-adjusted, and disappears, too.

Monika's happy to see you, though. As a side effect of becoming president of the book club, she's become aware she's in a game and of the player being a separate being from the player character, and indeed finds it painful when the game is turned off or when she's sidelined. Which was a bit rough, since she's meant as a side character that just facilitate the other three girls; their deaths and deletions reflect Monika's unskilled attempts to make a romance route for herself that never existed. Eventually, it turns into a suicidal cosmic temper tantrum, where Monika taunts the player about her own character file.

That is to say, it's less erotic and more psychological horror.

It's not exactly a great game, in my opinion, even by the low standards of RenPy (later converted to Unity) games: the main gimmick goes a little long, the contrast between in-game and metafictional psychological horror can get a little jank, and the characters are pretty shallow even before Act 2. But at the time of original release, it was a moderately clever take on a field that had been swamped by extreme gore, jump scares, and/or bad Puella Magi imitators. In particular, it had a nuanced (if somewhat overcome by the metafictional components) take on mental health, depression, and the need for connection.

So it was a bit of a thing in fandom.

There's a possibility that Google and Serenity Forge will be able to come to some agreement, but as funny as getting Nice Boat'd in the middle of a sleepover would be, the most plausibly disagreeable scenes are pretty central to the story. At minimum, I doubt the game will be back without some censorship. And the Android environment, for better or (much more common) worse, is an extremely common one, so that's not a small hit to the author's reach.

It doesn't matter that much, since the game's still available on Steam, direct download, the Nintendo eShop, iOS store, yada. For now. Hell, you can even sideload an APK. Kinda, for now. And it's just one game, just as every other case was just one game. We don't - and won't - know whether this was just one pointy-headed content reviewer, some broad Karen-led whisper campaign, or a government regulator calling in the implication. It's not even that noteworthy for its 'tameness': while DDLC is relatively low on sexuality, it is still pretty mature from a violence and language perspective, and other marketplaces have been willing to pretty aggressively censor tame or tamer sexual content (oh no not a nipple). Conservatives have clearer-cut and more permanent examples of overtly political censorship.

But I highlight it to repeat an old point: you might well not be interested in most cases of censorship, but censorship as a movement will eventually be interested in you. Its very ability to salami-slice out stuff you don't care about is what makes it able to crush the singular you whenever your turn comes.

Google is evil spyware and many of their practices would be illegal in a sensible country. They scheme for monopoly, they interfere with democratic elections through perturbing search results, they violate privacy by proactively spying on users and secretly handing over data to malicious parties, they outsource tons of their employment to foreign countries, and the list goes on. I hope this latest in Google's bad behavior drives people to alternatives.

From an artistic standpoint, censorship of this particular game is quite bad. It is one of few games I know about that manages to pretend it is haunted in a way that works alongside both gameplay and storytelling. I think the fiddling with game files, while brief, is reasonably well done and shows promise as a mechanic for future games. The placement of secret messages in the files, and the fact that deleting characters kills them and changes the gamestate is interesting. Removing it from the store means that it is less likely for future devs to see it and get inspired. Which is a shame, since I would like to see the boundaries of the "haunted game" genre be pushed.

Of course, DDLC is old enough for everyone interested to have played it at this point, but it certainly does seem unnecessary and like a step in the wrong direction for such a large platform to remove it. Especially when many other horror games still exist on the platform.

While this certainly reflects badly on Google and raises the cultural temperature on censorship in general, I don't think it'll directly reduce availability of the game all that much; as far as I know, Google was never a major provider of the game in the first place. In any case, the developers already repeatedly cucked to censors years ago both to appease their friend circles (by making the disclaimers around the game increasingly heavy-handed and adding trigger warning settings plainly incompatible with the nature of the game) and to get the game access to consoles (by slightly toning down miscellaneous scenes for bespoke console releases).

Not about the censorship, but I love the Yahtzee review of DDLC and wanted to share it.

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