oogle has removed popular psychological horror game Doki Doki Literature Club! from the Play Store. According to Dan Salvato, who led its development team, and publisher Serenity Forge, Google told them the visual novel was removed because it violated its Terms of Service in its depiction of sensitive themes. The game is “widely celebrated for portraying mental health in a way that meaningfully connects deeply with players around the world,” they said in their announcement. Its free version, which came out first, has been downloaded at least 30 million times, while the paid “Plus” version has had at least one million downloads. The visual novel has repeatedly made Engadget’s lists of favorite games over the years.
**alternative download link you can download it from https://com-serenityforge-dokidokiliteratureclub.en.uptodown.com/android/download
Don’t know if it is trustworthy though.
You play download the PC version officially from steam, only android was removed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/698780/Doki_Doki_Literature_Club/
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Friendly reminder that Google is making moves this year to make installing apps away from their store as painful as possible.
And it’s such a great game. It exploits really well the expectations of visual novels and games in general, first pretending to play along them and then breaking those expectations. (I’m trying my hardest to not spoil it, seriously.)
But Google doesn’t care about it. Or about sensible rules. Or enforcing fairly the very rules it expects you to follow.
Awesome devs have the free version waiting for you, and other less puritanical storefronts to pay them some money if you liked it.
Would be rather funny if they added it to EGS
We need to fight harder against this sanitization of media and the internet…
The PC version is on Epic so it’s not the craziest of ideas
