Game Theory - Doki Doki's SCARIEST Monster is Hiding in Plain Sight (Doki Doki Literature Club)

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

You may think you know Doki Doki Literature Club, but I'm here to say you've barely scratched the surface. Because under this twisted visual novel turned horror game lies an entirely other story, hidden in the poems, code, and files.

Oh, no way, a text message! Who's it from? Aw, Jack Septukey, how sweet. And there's a picture? Wait, that- that's not how I wrote this gag. Another one, what's going on here? Wait. What the heck? Steph!

Steph, are you pranking me? You promised you'd spend time with me, Matt. Me. And only me. Only me. Only me. Only me. Only me.

Only me. Only me. Only me, only me, only me, only me, only me, only me. Now let's make a theory together. Hello internet, welcome to game theory, where it's our goal to systematically prove that everything in your life is secretly terrifying. Looking at its Steam store page, dokey-dokey literature club seems harmless enough. A cutesy, pastel-tinged dating sims starring four adorable wifu's, as the kids say,

all of whom you can try your hand at wooing for the low low price of free. But look a little closer and it quickly becomes clear. that this game isn't the fun, light-hearted visual novel that it makes itself out to be. For starters, the top tag on the Steam Store page is psychological horror, which makes it seem misclassified. And at the bottom of the game's description, which is a cute little greeting note from the Literature Club's president Monica, you'll find a very stern warning in bold letters. This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed. And in case you missed that one, the game greets you with that message yet again as you boot it up.

One final reminder that this isn't meant for the faint of heart. It seems like a joke, right? But let me assure you, it is no joke. It is without exaggeration one of the best written, most surprising game stories of this year, even if it takes about two hours of barely slow-paced visual novel action before you get to the really good stuff. So if you're still here after that, let me give you a quick rundown. During your first play-through doki-dokey literature club seems like a normal visual novel with a pretty neat mechanic of composing poems in order to woo the various girls in the club.

Your childhood friend Sayori, quiet bookishyuri, and young aggressive Natsuki. But at the end of your first run, strange things begin happening. It all starts when Sayori succumbs to her depression and commits suicide. Soon after, she's deleted from the story entirely, and you're kicked back to the title screen. But something is clearly not right this time. As you replay the game, the world begins breaking apart, as it tries to move forward without Sayori in it. Eventually, you discover that the club's president, Monica, has become self-aware within the game, and is manipulating the game's code even files on your very computer in a desperate attempt to make you you the player love her

When nothing else works she deletes everything else in the game leaving Just Monica just Monica and you in the club room with nothing to do but talk forever at least until you do what she did to the other characters and delete her character file in order to save everyone else and reach the true ending Dokey Dokey Literature Club intentionally leaves a lot dangling for gamers to figure out on their own. But out of all of it, one question has been bugging me nonstop since I finished playing it. What is the story behind Monica? The game presents her as simply being a character in a visual novel who suddenly becomes self-aware, but all of that doesn't quite add up. The way DDLC is designed, the way that Monica manipulates it, and the things that she says in her extended conversation with you,

all hint that there's something much more sinister going on with her. And that is the theory for today. That's right, dear theorists. The hidden truth of the dokey-dokey literature club is that Monica is from a different game. Monica is Flawey who also happens to be Porky from Earthbound who's really the purple guy from FNAF Sorry the rest of the theorist team just pulled me aside for a quick intervention Apparently I'm banned from making any links between this game and undertale or any game and undertale Really I'm not allowed to touch Undertale anymore but in all seriousness Monica is from a different game and not just Monica either

Doki Dokey has a lot more to it than first meets the eye, even once you make it through the main story Because the ending isn't even the ending when you restart the game after deleting Monica Sayori assumes the role of club president now and things are pretty normal until the end of the first day When you get perhaps the biggest twist of them all Sayori now is self-aware Expressing the exact same desire to hoard you to herself that Monica did so there's got to be something that at least Monica and Sayori have in common and possibly the other girls as well that's making a all of this possible. See, there's something about the way dokey-dokey literature club is designed that doesn't quite add up.

Throughout your second play-through, Monica reveals that she's been manipulating events behind the scenes the whole time, that she's been messing with Yuri, Natzuki, and Sayori's character files by amplifying their worst traits so that you'll like them less and you'll like her more. That's why Yuri goes from being a little bit clingy to being self-harming and obsessive, why Natzuki goes from being flirty mean to just being a plain old jerk, and why Sayori goes from being mildly depressed to suicidal in the span of a few days. These are all the consequences of Monica haphazardly adjusting their character parameters behind the scenes, but hold on a second.

That might seem to make sense on the surface, but if you actually stop and think about it, that's not really how visual novels work at all. Visual novel characters aren't AI-based. Their behavior is determined entirely by what's written in the game's script. The game's dialogue script, not programming script. I can see how that gets confusing. There's simply no need for a character and a dating sim to have complicit behaviors like this, but what if they were created for a more complex game?

What if the characters in doki-dokey literature club were intended to be used in a different game altogether? One where they would need to have more complex believable responses to a greater range of player choice. What if their assets were simply repurposed from that game in order to make this dating sim? It's not just speculation. The clues are there, hidden in plain sight and dokey-dokey's central mechanic, the poems. Over the course of the first act, you read poems from all the other club members, which seems pretty innocent. Sure, reading between the lines, you can start to get hints that Sayori is depressed, that Yuri is prone to self-harm, that Natsuki is being abused by your father,

but it's nothing overt. In the game's second act, you're given three randomly selected special poems out of a possible 11 that makes these hints much more overt. But there's one of these poems in particular that really stands out, a huge block of redacted text, with only a few letters left visible, Spelling out the question, That would be unsettling enough on its own, but if there's one thing Scott Cawthon has trained me to do,

it's to run dark images through Photoshop and play around with sliders. If you crank up the exposure on that image all the way to max capacity, suddenly it becomes possible to read the full text, and man, it is weird. Irregular heartbeat, heart palpitations, arrhythmia, I search and search, eyes scanning everything I can find on their symptoms. What is this? Shortness of breath, chest pain, Dizziness? No. This is all wrong. Alyssa's symptoms are nowhere near this simple. I've seen it twice now. The screams of pain, sickeningly pale skin, vomiting blood. There is no other explanation other than that Renier's information was a complete and utter lie. This can't all be coincidence. It's not possible. I don't know how much of this Renier is behind, but I do know this. There is something horribly wrong with this family. When I accepted the invitation to become a part of it, I can hear Alyssa's screams through the wall. I listen helplessly.

Reneer said he would be with her shortly. Is he in her room now? Why is she screaming even louder than before? Chilling, right? This creepy letter is literally hidden right in front of your face while you play this game. And what's it all mean? Well, those opening lines make it sound like someone who's trying to identify an illness. A regular heartbeat, heart palpitations, arrhythmia,

are all possible problems of the heart, so it's not so much this person is making a diagnosis, but rather it's someone trying to read the symptoms he's seeing and figure out what the diagnosis. It's a clinical assessment, which means that the speaker is a doctor of some kind. And notice the words he uses Their symptoms. It's an illness affecting multiple people a family as we see later in the letter a family that Apparently you can join almost like a cult. It's also worth noting that this doctor who's speaking has some degree of detachment from this girl Alyssa Almost like she's a research subject of some kind possibly part of a human experiment and when you put all this together a cult

performing experiments on young girls, it starts sounding familiar. We hear about human experiments exactly two times in dokey-dokey literature club, both times when Yuri describes the plot of the portrait of Markov, the book that she wants to read with us, a book which has a, quote, ominous-looking eye symbol on the front cover. In the first act, Yuri makes it sound relatively innocent enough, quote, basically it's about this girl in high school who moves in with her long-lost younger sister, but as soon as she does so, her life gets really strange.

She gets targeted by these people who escaped from a human experiment prison, and while her life is in danger, she needs to desperately choose who to trust." End quote. In the second act, Yuri's personality gets a bit more unhinged, and she gives us a creepier description of what's actually going on on these pages. Quote again, basically, it's about this religious camp that's turned into a human experiment prison. All the people trapped there have this trait

that turns them into killing machines that lust for blood. But the facility gets even worse, and they start start selectively breeding people by cutting off their limbs and affixing them too, and then she cuts off. That's a lot of information for a fake book, especially when you compare it to what we learn about Netsuki's favorite manga. And that's because what Yuri tells us about the portrait of Markov isn't just a short snippet of text meant to create the illusion of a bigger story. It is the bigger story here. It's the plot of the horror game that Team Salvatto is working on.

The game that all four of these characters originate from. And if you think I'm done, Oh no, we have just scratched the surface. We can dig deeper to uncover more about this horror game, including its title and release date, as well as how these four girls fit into the overall story because Team Salvato left a whole ARG's worth of content hidden in Dokey Dokey's game files.

If you thought that the literature club was interesting before, simply because it had these cool meta moments and jump scares, well, get ready. There's a whole other game here, just resting underneath the surface waiting to be puzzled together. That'll start to make you really question everything you thought you knew about Sayori, Netsuki, Monica, and especially Yuri. As you'll know if you finish the game, the character files in the game's directory play a huge role in the plots. Monica manipulates and deletes them one by one in her quest to make you love her. And ultimately, you have to delete Monica's file in order to reach the game's true ending.

But there's more in these files than just character information. Each of them is a puzzle in and of themselves, left in the game to be solved by the fans. And two fans of DDLC in particular stepped up to the challenge. Reddit users Mitt Host and Warchamp 7 dug deep into these files and uncovered Uncovered, posting their findings to the R-Visual novels subreddit, and the lore bits they uncovered broke the portrait of Markov mystery wide open. So the character files on your computer start as dot C-HR files, which isn't a real file format. that programs can recognize. But that doesn't mean you can't open them. If you use a text editor like notepad, you can absolutely see what's inside and that's exactly what they did, with the text inside each file giving them clues as to what they should be doing next. Yuri's, uh-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-hury something about this visual novel makes me go through puberty. Yuri's file was the easiest to crack. It started as a bunch of random letters and numbers. But that pile of letter vomit was actually text encoded in base 64. It's an encoding technique that converts by

binary data into text, specifically ASCII text, the same stuff that Bob built his army using a few years ago on YouTube. That may sound like it's really hard to decode, but all you have to do is copy it and paste it into a base 64 decoder, like this one right here. When you decrypt Yeri's file, you'll see that it's actually a short story. A creepy pasta which the game's director Dan Salvatto confirmed that he wrote over two years ago and just stuck in the game as an Easter egg. It's a spooky story to be sure, but it seems to be just that. An Easter egg. A red herring. It is nothing compared to everything else hidden in these other character files.

Netsuki's file came next, which, when opened in a text editor, gave the clue that this should be opened as a PNG file. Changing the extension resulted in this odd discolored image. But for anyone who's had some experience playing around with Photoshop, this color scheme may remind you of what happens when you invert the colors on a picture. It produces those signature blues and grays. So reversing that inversion, the picture suddenly starts to look like a real picture. And not just any sort of picture, a face. Rotate the image and wrap that texture around a 3D cone,

then look at the cone from above, and it turns into an image of a mysterious blonde woman with whited out eyes. This woman doesn't resemble any of the other characters in the game, or anyone talked about by him. So perhaps then she's a character from the other game being developed by Team Salvato. Maybe it's Alyssa, the girl suffering the strange illness that we heard mentioned in the letter found in the last episode. Monica's character file, when converted into a piece,

into a PNG turns out to be an image of a ring with a square of black and white static in the middle. But that's not just any static. It's a QR code was what I initially thought, but nope, it's actually way more complicated than that. And huge compliments to the guys on Reddit for solving this one, it's actually binary. Computer language, it's a bunch of ones and zeros, where one number is represented by the color black and the other number is represented by the color white. So what mid-host did was to take those black and white pixels and convert them lines, by line into strings of binary, then convert that binary sequence into alpha-numeric text using an online converter which resulted in yet another pile of letters and numbers. But these should be starting to look a bit more familiar, right? It's more base 64 code, which, when converted, reveals a note that really starts to bring all this together.

Can you hear me? Who are you? I can't see you. But I know you're there. Yeah, you can definitely hear me. You've been watching for a while. now, right? I guess I should introduce myself or something. Um, my name is... Actually, that's stupid. You obviously already know my name. Sorry. Anyway, I'm guessing if you were able to put a stop to this, you would have done it by now. I mean, I know you're not like evil or anything, because you've already helped me so much. I really should thank you for that. For everything you've done, you're really like a friend to me, so thank you. So, thank you. So much. I think more than anything else, I really don't want it all to be for nothing.

Everyone else is dead. Maybe you already know that. I'm sure you do, actually. But it doesn't have to be that way, right? Well, there's a lot of stuff I don't understand. I don't even know if it's possible for me to understand it, but I know that this isn't my only story. I can see that now, really clearly. And I think everyone else has had that same kind of experience. Some kind of deja vu.

It's the third eye, right? Anyway, I could be totally wrong about this, but I really think you might be able to do something. I think you might be able to go back, however you want to put it, to go back and tell them what's going to happen, If they know ahead of time, then they should be able to avoid it. They should. If they remember their time with me in the other worlds, they should remember what I tell them.

Yeah, I really think this might be possible, but it's up to you. I'm sorry for always being so, you know, never mind. I know that's wrong. This is my story. It's time to be an epic hero. Both of us. 2018! Wow!

That is a lot to unpack, so let's get to it. First, it seems pretty clear that this was written by Monica, as evidenced by the, you've been watching me for a while now, and you already know my name lines. It also seems to be written after dokey dokey's true ending where she destroys the game. Notice how she comments that there's something you as a player can't stop, something that's killed everyone else, which is why she destroyed the game in the first place. But now come the bizarre parts. She says that she's experienced some sort of deja vu and that this isn't her only story,

supporting the idea that she's coming from somewhere else, perhaps once again, a different game. And it's not just her either, it's all four of them. Quote, everyone else has had the same kind of experience. What's most exciting though is her suggesting that perhaps we as the player can, quote, go back and tell them what's going to happen. If they know ahead of time, they should be able to avoid it. Meaning that we're going to be tasked with trying to jog their memories, or that in this new game there'll be some sort of Easter egg calling back to the events of dokey-dokey.

Quote, if they remember their time with me in other worlds. Other worlds, like other games that these characters have been used in. That maybe we can do something in these other games to warn the girls and prevent dokey-dokey from ever happening in the first place. And the conclusion is pretty much the most blatant. Team Salvato has another game coming in 2018, and in this game, Monica isn't the villain. She's the hero. Of everything in Monica's letter, though, one reference in particular really stands out, blaming this deja vu on what she calls the third eye.

And it's not just Monica either. This third eye is hidden throughout your time with the literature club. During Act 2, you're always given two regular poems. Once the game starts to break, the first poem that Netsuki gives you is a string of random letters and numbers, which at this point were old pros at decoding. Using Base 64, the text reveals a creepy hidden poem titled Open Your Third Eye,

which describes the narrator taking pleasure in stabbing someone to death. The second poem that Yuri gives you seems, at first glance, to be a huge block of random words. But hidden in plain sight at the end of it is another ominous passage that describes a compulsive stabbing and concludes with the line Quote the lust continues to linger through my veins an ache in my muscles stems from the unreleased tension experienced by my entire body Her third eye is drawing me closer. That's three characters now who've brought up this third eye The same eye that happens to be described on the cover of the portrait of Markov And remember what Yuri said about the plot of the book last episode

All the people trapped in the human experiments at the religious camp have this trait that turns them into killing machines that lust for blood. That trait is Undeniably the third eye. All of this points to Team Salvatto's new game being about human experimentation Researching a psychic phenomenon that invokes uncontrollable bloodlust and the people exposed to it. Which brings us to the last piece of the puzzle, Sayori's character file, which is by far the trickiest to decipher. In order to unlock its secrets, you need to convert it into an OGG audio file, which sounds like a lot of random noise at first. But when you open that audio in a visualizer program, and then apply a spectrograph to that visualization, you reveal a QR code that, when scanned, takes you to the website Project Libetina.com. Boo! That is a ton of work just to reach a page of plain

text. But the information contained within that text is eye-opening. Third eye-opening, that is. The page is an examination report dated January 5th 2004, which describes horrifying experiments being performed on a three-year-old psychic girl with the first name Libetina. Her last name is left blank. Another blank name appears at the bottom of the page, another subject who was terminated earlier. It's my guess that this girl is Alyssa. Even the number of letters in Alyssa match the number of redacted letters in the name. That's far from the only parallel to the portrait of Markov that we see here though. A note to the head doctor at the bottom of the page reads, quote, you are choosing to to avoid the measures necessary to prevent a repeat scenario, doctor. Will you not have as much faith in your personnel as you do in your god?" End quote.

Yuri says that the book is set in a religious camp that was turned into a human experiment prison, which lines up pretty well with this mysterious doctor's reported devotion to a god of some kind. And the redacted poem's allusion to joining this mysterious family. Judging from the various notes on this web page, the tests performed on the three-year-old were all about activating Libetina's third eye. lust for blood, which proved successful, but then, based on the failed test results, Libetina is then unable to suppress. But not only are we getting more and more clues as to the next game Team Salvatto is working on, we're actually seeing exactly how our favorite

clubmates are gonna fit into the story. Because I am confident, three-year-old Libetina grows up to be one of the four girls we see in dokey-doki-doki literature club. And what's more, I can prove exactly which one it is. Lipitina is a three-year-old, and her height and weight are both average for her age, so there's not much to go on there. But if we look a bit further down the page, we see a list of noted behaviors that the researchers say should be ignored in future examinations. Quitching, vocal ticks, biting, epipphoria, vomiting, screaming, harm to examiner, harm to self, misplaced laughter. There's one character who we see display almost all of these traits during dokey-doki literature club, particularly in that second act. Yuri. Once the game bugs out, Yuri's dialogue becomes the most erratic. We repeatedly see her eyes twitching when she talks to us. She screams a fair bit, laughs erratically at a few points, and that bit about self-harm? Hell, I don't think I need to explain that one. But these aren't the only clues that we have to go on. There are two more things that absolutely confirm that Yuri is Libetina. The first is her age. Libetina was born January 5, 2001, which would make her 17 years old in 2018.

the year that Project Libetina is set to release. As the only member of the Literature Club and Senior Year, Yuri is the only one of the girls in the right age range to be Libetina. But there's also one more piece of crucial evidence that absolutely clinches this theory. And the evidence isn't found in the game itself, or even in its data, or a random hidden web page, but rather in the dokey-dokey Literature Club merchandise store. Yeah!

This guy is hiding clues in more places than Scott Cawthon. Team Salvato might not be offering much in terms of merch items, but the few items that are present reveal some very interesting details. So let's look at the postings. Four of them are simply CG of each girl taken straight from the game. Nothing too exciting there. Another four are creepy original artwork featuring iconic quotes from the characters. Between all of these, there's this running motif of the girls being tied up in a red string.

Even Monica has a bow wrapped around her, but Yuri doesn't seem to possess these strings. In fact, all of the red strings seem to be a murray from her, from her heart, from this flower, whatever this is, ensnaring all the other girls, an allusion to Libetina's psychic influence over everyone else. But if that doesn't convince you, there are two more posters for sale featuring original artwork. One of these is a surprisingly cute picture of Monica handing you the song she sings you at the end of the game. It's cute. It's very cute.

The last poster, called Yuri Unhinged, is a bit different. And when I say a bit different, I mean completely different from anything else in the game or on the site. It shows the quiet bookworm Yuri sitting in the classroom at sunset, toying with a knife. For someone unhinged, her posture seems oddly relaxed, even confident. In fact, it's the most confident we've ever seen her, like she's in full control of the situation. And behind her, we see all sorts of ominous texts scrawled on the blackboard. To her right, we see a poster.

A poster with a big ol' Illuminati confirmed eye in the middle, and the words, help me scribbled along the top. This is the third eye, Yuri's third eye, and this is the only artwork where we see see it depicted. Illuminati confirmed. Yuri as Libetina confirmed. Doki Dokey Literature Club isn't just a free game made to promote Team Salvato's upcoming horror title. It's a part of Project Libetina. Monica is the upcoming game's protagonist. Well, Yuri is the monster at the center of the story, Libetina herself. This is why Yuri was so attached to the portrait of Markov's

story. It is her story and the disconnect from being put in the wrong game is the reason that Monica becomes self-aware. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.