Never in my life have I felt so used by a game. Feels dirty. The video game equivalent of emotional abuse.
5 stars, would recommend.
It’s all fucked up heartwrenching bullshit and/or confusion through the main game, AND THEN you play the “plus” stories and they’re fucking incredibly empathetic and thoughtful with positive messaging about neurodivergence and also feel like they might fall into a lesbian porno at any minute
I played the freebie version ages ago, any thoughts on if the Plus -version’s content worth revisiting it? The shock value of the game is kinda one-and-done I feel.
IMHO the Plus version is a downgrade since it is made for consoles and does not require you to modify files on your own system.
Yeah the 6 prequel stories are cute but $15 is outrageous. I’m sure you can just watch them on youtube.
I bought it specifically to support the dev, which is way more effective regarding small games by small publishers than big games by big publishers.
Remember when it just came out i’ve seen “psychological horror” in steam tags. Thinking that’s probable there for luls but decided to check the game anyway… i wasn’t ready for it.
I think the experience is diminished a lot by knowing what the twist is. Especially considering that twist is the only reason most people tried it in the first place when it went viral a few years ago.
I played the original and it was such a trip that I bought Plus when it came out, but haven’t gotten around to playing it because I know the twist and it doesn’t hold the same.
I had literally no idea what it was when I played it, so it really span me out. My wife played it first and recommended it to me.
And yeah, it’s a trip.
I still remember the first time I played it. I was still living with my parents, and they left for a few days. I started the game in the evening, and couldn’t stop until I reach the end of it … in the morning. It’s very uncommon for me to do so (even at the time), but it was so … captivating. I could not stop and go to sleep 😅.
If you want more psychological horror emotional abuse, try Echo, which gets frequently compared to DDLC. It’s set up like a gay furry visual novel to start with, but it’s more like Night in the Woods where the paths are who you hang out with instead of who you explicitly want to “date”. As the story progresses it gets extremely dark. I could only do one of the paths before I had to look up the others because I’m too much of a chicken.
Fair warning that it’s a slow burn to get to the rough stuff, but the story is solid and it’s humorous on the way so it’s not boring.
Edit: I hadn’t played Echo in a few years so I went to the wiki to refresh myself on the story and it is a lot more tightly-written and lore-heavy than I realized. Each “path” has a different story with a subset of the lore, so you need to play all of them to begin to understand the full picture. There’s also a sequel, a prequel, and a prequel-prequel(?), which all presumably contribute to the lore. I see there’s a giant Let’s Play of most of it, which I think I now feel compelled to watch at some point. It would probably be less spooky to experience it with other people in control.
Edit 2: I strongly recommend you don’t play Carl’s first, solely on the basis of it not being a strong introduction to the game. Carl’s route takes a long time to get into the swing of things, and the story payoff doesn’t entirely make up for it (though I still really loved this path by the end). This was apparently the first path they wrote, and cynically I think that shows a bit. Leo’s path was much more of a page-turner for me throughout and I think it gives a much stronger sample of the unique Echo flavor. Leo’s is the one I played years ago and there’s maybe a dozen moments from this path which will never leave my brain.
I’ve seen people online say to do
Carl->Leo->TJ->Jenna->Flynn, and with regards to Carl and Leo I’d say objectively that’s probably the correct order in terms of lore unfolding, but there’s only a couple of small references from Carl’s route that you can notice in Leo’s route, so if you’re on the fence about whether you’re even interested in the game at all I’d do Leo’s first so you can get a proper introduction to the game’s themes.Oh shoot my partner and I started that and got a good way through and completely forgot about it! The writing is very good. I’ll re-ass that to my list!
Auto-correct or Freudian slip?
Either way, I’ve assed “re-ass” to my vocabulary list.
Oop, autocorrect! Hahaha
I just finished Echo and Arches last night and holy shit.
Echo is a bit odd with the pacing, the choices and a general vibe of “this was made up as they wrote it.” It wasn’t particularly scary, either. Meanwhile, Arches, knocks it out of the park. The main story is pretty scary, and then the “alternate reality” part makes for a good buddy cop type show premise with a horror twist to it; I wonder if the author plans to do more with that whole thing. I saw them post about how they really like writing Devon and Cameron, so I hope to see more of them in the future.
Now I’m about to start up The Smoke Room. Echo Project is awesome. Might as well also check out Adastra while mentioning them. Not horror, but emotionally harmful still. Lol
Ugh, I feel like there’s no way I could do Arches if it’s way scarier than Echo. Maybe if I only do it during the day. I’m fairly sure when I did Echo I played it into the night and regretted that. I do feel like dipping back into it all for the story though. I think I’ll try the let’s play series at some point to start with.
Well… Did you think the monsters were scary or Brian and Duke? Because Arches has less supernatural horror and more of the realistic kind, and with the whole romance between the main characters along with the themes of PTSD and trauma, the action sequences are so much more visceral and realistic.
Moreso the supernatural stuff for me. The other stuff was dark but I wasn’t checking for Brian under my bed.
spoiler
Although after reading some of the wiki today I’m a bit more reassured that a lot of the supernatural stuff in Echo seems to be neutral/benevolent, or at least misunderstood.
If you liked DDLC, check out You Me and Her a love story. Also Slay the Princess has a lot of weirdness going on and is a super good VN.
I thought Inscryption was great as well, which is great if you like both DDLC (in terms of weirdness) and Slay the Spire (in terms of gameplay). It’s not nearly as intense as DDLC, but the dev also made Pony Island, which is a bit closer to DDLC (not quite though).
Also I’m playing you on linux via wine from a pirated repack, video game. How the fuck am I supposed to know what’s supposed to be happening here and what’s my janky-ass setup?
That may actually complicate things for you. Not sure if you’ve truly finished the game or not, because there comes a point where you’re instructed to poke around the actual game files to make some changes to them during one of the endings.
No I played the Plus version, it abstracts out the filesystem stuff. The game made it pretty obvious what needed to be done.
I don’t know what you are talking about. Kudos to you to openly admit you are into dating schoolgirls at… check notes… 53 years old.
Why did you jump to such weird conclusions? You could have googled the name of the game in the time it took you to comment this and understand it’s not a dating game.
Are you trolling? It’s clearly a dating simulator, I don’t care if “there’s no nudity” or “they are all 18 so it’s fine”.
Get a life.
Critically-Acclaimed Psychological Horror
“Is this a dating simulator?” - Idiot Butterfly Meme Guy
To be fair, I also didn’t read the description before I played and all to the better. It’s okay to be wrong, it means you’re learning!
TIL
spoiler
I’m clearly messing with you guys, I played the game myself.
Yeah no. You hit the “it’s just a joke bro!” phase. You meant things prior to getting called out and downvoted to hell.
You went straight for “I’m not smart”.
How can I mean those if I played the game myself? Doesn’t it clicks to you that the point of the game is the shocking value of it 100% looking like a dating sim untill it’s not? (And when it’s not it still builds on the building block of a dating sim, to be fair).
As of the “got downvoted to hell”, hell does not exists nor does downvotes. I made my point and I’m ok with people missing the joke or not liking it.
It’s not actually about dating.
spoiler
It’s actually a horror game hiding in a dating sim. Things get more and more bizarre as you play and discover one of the characters has become self aware, eventually involving the player needing to edit files on their computer and such to progress. Not revolutionary but was mind blowing at the time. The Game Grumps did a fun play through.
That game is so good. I went in knowing it was a horror game, and even still that reveal in Sayori’s room caught me off-guard. Seriously, anyone here who hasn’t played it yet, do it. The game is free.
I love the musics. After finishing the game, I played the main theme in my car again and again and again.
