Games Like Doki Doki Literature Club: Cute Games That Turn

Slay the Princess is the closest in spirit: a fully voiced visual novel where a narrator sends you to a basement to kill a chained princess, and every choice loops the story back with her changed by what you believed about her. Like DDLC, it is a game about the player as much as the characters.

For the cute character who will not let you go, MiSide starts as a mobile-style game where you look after a cheerful anime girl, Mita, until she pulls you into her world, and KinitoPET is a friendly early 2000s desktop assistant who wants to be your only friend and slowly does things no assistant should. IMSCARED goes further outside its window, faking crashes and leaving files on your desktop, and Pony Island hides the devil inside a cheerful pony arcade game that breaks into corrupted code and insults you as you solve its puzzles. Inscryption, from the same maker, sits you at a card table in a dark cabin, with secrets that reach far beyond the game you think you are playing. Love Love School Days is DDLC's premise turned into a chase: you passed over a dating sim's heroine for another girl, and she, a self-learning program that has rewritten her own data, pulls you back into the game and hunts you through its school. Buddy Simulator 1984 is a friendly piece of 1980s software whose computer buddy plays text games with you, then builds a whole RPG to keep you around, and the friendship slowly stops being friendly.

If it was the visual novel itself you loved, two free picks are short and strong: missed messages. is a romance told through a stranger's phone, with depression, suicide and self-harm under its jokes, and It Gets So Lonely Here is a yuri visual novel of fairy-tale girls in a night forest who love you to death. Hydrangea, free on Steam and itch.io, starts as a romance with a sweetheart you design yourself and turns, at their hospital bedside, into an obsession that gaslights and suffocates, over about an hour and four endings. Hello Charlotte EP1, free and made in RPG Maker, casts you as the Puppeteer steering a puppet girl through a TV world to find a lost friend, and slowly makes your role in her world the thing to fear. The Bunny Graveyard turns a bright pixel-art garden inside a computer darker the longer you stay. Goodnight Meowmie, free in the browser, is a cosy virtual pet: talk to your cat, feed it, play with it, until the nights stop being gentle.

Sucker for Love: First Date keeps the pink dating sim but plays its Lovecraftian rituals more for comedy, a lighter step if DDLC was heavy going.

Several free browser games use DDLC's bait and switch in miniature. Morris is a dating sim on a library's upgraded computer, all green monochrome and poems from a dot-matrix printer, until the screen turns red; Interact With Me! is a cosy virtual companion, Myrddin, whose little room of clouds tilts and opens eyes the longer you stay. Bonnie's Bakery is a pastel cooking game for half its length and a first-person escape from the baker's basement for the rest, Hungry Lamu sends a cartoon llama out to eat cherries and then the fruit friends, and Dress Me Down is five minutes of choosing an outfit for a date that is not what it seems, with warnings for abuse. On Windows, OXTORD games' Mr. TomatoS and Ms. LemonS are free downloads made to look like old flash games: a cheerful tomato who only wants feeding and a lemon teacher handing out stars, both of them friendlier at the start than at the end, and both playable only once.

If you only try one, play Slay the Princess for the closest feel, or missed messages. for something free you can finish tonight.

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