Doki Doki Literature Club 64

Doki Doki Literature Club is a homebrew port by SpookyIluha released on 15 April 2025. It is a port of the 2017 game of the same name by Team Salvato where you play as a high school boy who joins an after-school literature club filled with girls.

This page is spoiler-free.

You can get the CRC-fixed ROM from its download page by using the password mangaisliterature. You can also get the source code from the github page and also get the original ROM there too.

The game will crash at the first save point on an Everdrive V2 because it can’t detect the save type, so you need to correct the CRC and then add the save type to your saves.txt file.

About Doki Doki Literature Club

Story

This is a very story-heavy game (it’s a visual novel, duh), so I’ll keep it short and spoiler-free.

You play as a male protagonist (called Main Character “MC” by fans) who is pressured to join the literature club by his childhood friend Sayori. In the club, he meets the popular class president Monika, shy and subdued Yuri and of course the fiery and cute Natsuki.

Throughout the game, you go through a loop of chatting with the girls, writing poetry, presenting your poetry to them, getting feedback on it and reading their poetry as well. Depending on the type of language you use in the poems you write, you can get closer to a particular girl – Yuri likes dark themes, Sayori likes bittersweet and mundane things, and Natsuki like cute words.

As you progress with a particular girl, she will open up more and more to you, which is where the game gets interesting. Not to say too much, but they will reveal things about themselves that will relate to topics that have been hinted at earlier in the game, bringing closure to any foreshadowing you get from reading between the lines.

The game builds up towards the club fair, where your club will try to promote itself to the rest of the school. I’ll leave the plot summary at that.

Gameplay

This is a visual novel so there isn’t much gameplay per se, 90%+ of the game is reading the dialogue between the characters (and inside MC’s head).

Where you do have some kind of input is in dialogue choices and poem writing. Dialogue choices are pretty much what you’d expect – Just pick one of a few choices and read through the resulting branch. This is fairly standard when it comes to visual novels.

Where Doki Doki Literature Club stands out from other games in the genre is in its poem-writing mechanics. At the end of each day, you have to write a poem to share with the rest of the club. Not only would it be tedious, but in an era before LLMs, it’s kind of hard for a computer to interpret poetry.

The way around this is that the player selects words from a randomly-generated list. After each word is chosen, the list refreshes and one of the girl’s icons jumps from joy if it’s a word that they like. Again, Sayori likes bittersweet/mundane words, Yuri likes deep/eloquent words and Natsuki likes cute words. The poem will appeal to the girl whose words you pick the most.

As the game progresses, you’ll grow closer to the girl who you write poems for and you will spend more time with her and she will open up to you.

Review and conclusion

Doki Doki Literature Club is a masterclass in storytelling. Not only in the game’s story itself, but the way that the characters within it teach you about writing poetry and appreciating literature. Even more so given that this game is mostly reading text.

This port by SpookyIluha is as faithful as can be. The characters look good, backgrounds are great and the story is all there. It even includes a Russian translation and the ability to add other mods if you want to recompile it yourself.

If I had to nitpick, here are some of the things that could be improved:

• Anti-aliasing. The borders on all the characters are ugly and jagged, it might have been more useful to have 32-bit colours to allow for some transparency in the textures, if memory allows.
• Music Skipping. The music sometimes doesn’t loop correctly and it feels like it skips.
• EEPROM. The game crashes if there is no EEPROM detected or it is configured incorrectly, so it would be nice to have it be optional.

I played the original game on the PC back when it was new and playing through it again today it still holds up well. Enough time has passed that it’s great to rediscover it as most of the plot’s minutia have faded from memory so I would recommend that you give Doki Doki Literature Club 64 a look even if you have played it already, just for the fun of it.