It's a fine line between being a great game with a few trophies that require something more and being a great game with a trophy list so unecessarilly long that the game becomes incredibly boring as a result.
Unfortunately,
Doki Doki is one of the latter games. Most of the trophies are fairly simple, but to get 100% you'll habe to repeat the same action again and again in a way that one can only imagine was either discovered by someone being incredibly bored one day or having to have asked the developer how to do it.
The game itself is typically dark and in places weirdly amusing by the standards of the genre. The game comes with a warning that people of a nervous disposition won't like the games content, which isn't strictly true, this isn't the most out there horror game. There's visual novels out there that are worse in theme. The story is about joining an poetry club, the gilrs are excited you're in there and you have to create poems to basically convince them to be with you. A very familiar pattern for some visual novels, the game gets dark at the end of act one, and spirals in to a weird virtual Skynet-meets-Tinder sort of deal.
The artwork is what you'd expect from a more respected visual novel powerhouses in Japan, not the sort of
Ratalaika stuff that gets poured in to PSN every so often (that I've been guilty for playing myself), it's well drawn and it's obvious a lot of work went in to it, although there's a limited number of backgrounds unlike titles such as
Root Letter.
Now the annoyance is the trophies, as I've previously stated. The game itself is enjoyable and it has a darker side to it, which is typical of visual novels.
The trophies can be really RNG based. To get 100% you need to earn secrets, now these are by nature rare to find in the game, which is fine, let me play it several times but one in particular can take nearly 200 attempts to unlock by exiting the game and restarting it. Which becomes infuriating.
It should be explained that the game has a desktop within the storyline that you can exit to every so often and it's this that the trophy is dependent on. Not what you do in the game (storyline) itself. The poems can also be annoyingly RNG based, which again this isn't one that I'm too upset about because this makes sense. You have to create poems, as I stated above, but each girl has her own set of words that she likes and you need to choose twenty of these to get a perfect rating for that particular girl. Sometime sone of their words may not spawn for three pages. Which is a tiny bit annoying, but more understandable than the back in and out of the menus TWO HUNDRED times for a single secret item.
All in all,
Doki Doki isn't the best visual novel out there, it's only £10 which is a good price for it, but if you're not a massive fan of VN's then maybe wait for a sale.
+ Good (but typical) visual style
+ Good storyline
+ Can be quite creepy
- Some trophies take you out the game too long
- Not as good as other Visual Novels on the market
- Although good, Storyline is short
- I think Monika is going to give me nightmares.
3.5