Content Warning: This article contains mention of suicide.

Doki Doki Literature Club Plus is a captivating mix between a horror game and a visual novel, tricking unsuspecting players into believing it's a dating simulator before plunging into a much darker narrative, and its multiple endings follow suit with surprises of their own. However, as is common with visual novels, the core gameplay revolves around dialogue options, the right combinations of which are key to reaching one of these three endings.

[Warning - major plot spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club Plus follow.]

In Doki Doki Literature Club Plus, the player's character s a school club, meeting a handful of seemingly nice girls to befriend and potentially date. As time goes on, the girls reveal darker aspects of themselves, including suicidal thoughts and possessive tendencies, and the game often breaks the fourth wall by "ending" and sending the player back to the main menu, showing "deleted" and "corrupted" save files.

In a game that goes out of its way to be tricky and obfuscate concepts and elements of its characters, how exactly do dialogue options influence the game's endings, and what do those endings actually mean? The ending that most will see is generally considered the "normal" ending for the game, whereas the other two are more akin to a traditional "good" or "bad" ending, although the core premises for all are relatively the same with only a few minor tweaks.

Doki Doki Literature Club Plus' Normal Ending, Explained

Monika Deletes The Game

Again, DDLC+'s normal ending is easiest to achieve, as the player doesn't have to do anything special in order to do so. All they have to do is play through the entirety of the game as normal, without reloading their save files and retrying all the different options in Act One. They can play through DDLC's poetry-writing sessions up to twice each, as long as they don't replay each one three times. Then, when given the choice to spend the weekend hanging out with either Yuri or Natsuki, choose one, and don't reload the save to try the other.

Later in the game, Monika reveals that she's become completely self-aware: in essence, she knows that she's a character in a video game, and has learned how to edit the game's files to get her way. Jealous of the other girls in the club, she deletes them from existence. The player will be trapped in a circuitous conversation with Monika until they navigate to the in-game operating system and delete Monika's files from the game.

In the normal ending, Sayori appears and thanks the player for deleting Monika. In Monika's absence, Sayori takes over as club president. However, she immediately becomes self-aware just as Monika did. She begins to make threats towards the player until Monika suddenly reappears. She deletes Sayori, and then the whole game to spare others the burden of self-awareness. The player will then receive a letter from Monika, in which she describes her realization of how miserable self-awareness makes people.

Doki Doki Literature Club Plus' Bad Ending, Explained

Deleting Monika Early

To get the bad ending, the player needs to delete Monika's character file as soon as possible, but it's not really worth it considering it stops the entire game in its tracks. Still, if the player wants to see every ending possible, this is probably the easiest one, as it can be attempted from almost any point of the game.

If Monika is deleted before starting a new game, Sayori becomes self-aware immediately, much as she also does in the game's normal ending. However, she appears to be in immense pain, shouting "Please make it stop," before deleting every other character file. Loading the game after this will only show a grim scene of Sayori hanging herself. Progression after this is impossible without resetting Doki Doki Literature Club Plus.

In the original PC version of Doki Doki Literature Club, players literally had to delete the game from their hard drives and reinstall it in order to play a second time. In the Plus version, however, it's possible to start a second playthrough simply by running the file named "reset.sh" from the in-game OS.

If the player remains on Sayori's death screen for ten minutes, a message will appear on-screen in Sayori's handwriting: "Now everyone can be happy." This seems to imply that Sayori came to the same realization as Monika in the normal ending: that self-awareness is a curse. Much like Monika, she deleted the entirety of the game to spare the other girls the same fate.

Doki Doki Literature Club Plus' Good Ending, Explained

100% Completion

For the good ending, the game essentially needs to be 100% completed, which involves messing around with save files. In short, the player will need to choose all three options in all three poem-writing sequences, loading the save in between each. They'll need to spend a weekend with Yuri, then reload the save and spend it with Natsuki, and confess their love for Sayori at the end of it all.

After doing this, things will proceed as normal, and the initial scenes of the ending resemble the "normal" ending. However, instead of trying to attack the player, Sayori thanks them for trying to bring happiness to everyone in the club. She still deletes the remaining files to prevent anyone else from having to suffer, but instead of a letter from Monika at the end, it's a letter from the developer Dan Salvato thanking the player for taking the time to achieve Doki Doki Literature Club's special ending.

The final letter also goes on to describe Salvato's reasons for developing the game: motivated by his interest in unconvential storytelling, he sought to create a game that explored the empathy that dating sim players often have for fictional characters. By granting the girls in DDLC+ self-awareness, they effectively become real people within the narrative. It's this existential quandary that makes Doki Doki Literature Club a horror masterpiece, and players must truly experience all three endings to grasp its implications.