Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! Launch Trailer Promises Unspeakable Horror and Poetry

Erase Your Mistakes and Get Your Perfect Ending

Doki Doki Literature Club was one of the most horrifying games of 2017, helped by the fact that its initial release was completely free, and now it’s ready to give fans something to scream about in 2021 as well. Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! is an expanded re-release of the psychological horror dating sim that taught us all to check a game’s genre tags carefully before playing. A game can be marketed with pastel colors, cute anime girls, and a promise of sweet romance and still end up being pretty terrifying, as the many, many fans of Doki Doki Literature Club can attest. Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!, however, is being marketed with the full knowledge that it’s a horror game in disguise, which leads to some pretty nice moments in this launch trailer.

Not only is the trailer full of references to iconic moments in the original game–Yuri sprawling on the classroom floor, Monika at her piano, Monika in general–it straight-up refers to the four girls of the literature club as unspeakable horrors, which seems a bit mean. The trailer also highlights several disturbing words that players can choose to put into their poems, including the blunt option of ‘horror,’ all while peaceful background plays. Incidentally, it appears that Yuri likes the word ‘horror’ in her poems, so keep that in mind if you’re going for Yuri.

If you’re worried about how well the more meta elements of Doki Doki Literature Club will translate to a console release, don’t worry, Team Salvato already thought of that. Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! contains a virtual shell around the game that acts as a faux operating system. Needless to say, it’s filled to the brim with cryptic emails between the members of a fictional game development team and other strange files. Add in a ton of replay value and you’ve got a great opportunity to return to the joys and terrors of the literature club.