Just want to drive by and mention - a friend told me to play DDLC and I was highly skeptical given the anime pin-up girl art style. I eventually gave in and gave it a shot.
It's an amazing "playable story" unlike anything I have ever played. Super creative and well worth the couple hours it takes to play. I think it could use a few trigger warnings and it should be rated PG-13 / R, but there's stuff on Netflix 10x more disturbing so I don't quite grok the Google push back on this one.
> This game is not suitable for those who are easily disturbed. Individuals suffering from anxiety or depression may not have a safe experience playing this game. For content warnings, please visit https://ddlc.moe/warning.
Then the plus version even added in-game content warnings?
If you want something just as surprising & good, I'd recommend giving "Slay the princess" a go - a really unique hidden gem.
Or, if you're not into it, then check Euro Brady's playthroughs for this game ( he also did DDLC btw. ) - the commentary is awesome and gives insight into many things you wouldn't normally find out yourself.
It's hard to talk about STP without any spoilers, but I was kinda underwhelmed after how much it got hyped up. I liked the... adversary? You know, the fighty-fight, fight fight fight; but I've no great desire to find everything.
And it's also one of the most impressive displays of RenPy's capabilities you'll ever see.
Plenty of games do amazing things with ren'py that you wouldn't think were possible just by looking at the dialogue DSL. Maps, HUDs, minigames, incredibly dynamic pathways through the game. But DDLC takes it to a different level, partly by looking so "normal" on its surface.
In college I made some spare cash writing Ren'py games for some creatives online who had the writing and illustration chops, but needed programming help. At the time, DDLC was the model for great game design in Ren'Py. There are plenty of more technically impressive Ren'py games nowadays, but DDLC is still a terrific example of technical sophistication facilitating the story.
Ren'py is awesome by the way. A tour de force of software design, in my opinion.
I think it's mainly in relation to the constraints of the game engine, and also that the game engine being flexible enough to enable the gimmicks. I haven't played DDLC and probably never will, but from what I've read about it, like games with similar core themes (not dating sim) it has some gimmicks that tend to stretch the capabilities of a closed-down game engine, sometimes requiring patches to the engine itself. In this case the game engine Renpy offers an extensive DSL that makes it easy to add story scenes, media and dialogues, but allows you to fall back to python to do some tricky things.
It breaks the fourth wall in unexpected, and deeply unsettling ways.
As a gamer you take for granted that, at any moment, you can simply exit. The UI is a trustworthy boundary between the imagined world of a horror game, and the comfort of reality. In DDLC, you don't even feel safe on the title screen.
Most ren'py games, even the very good ones, barely change the UI at all. Roadwarden doesn't look like a ren'py game at all... until you open the save menu, and then it looks exactly like a ren'py game. Having developed ren'py games, I can tell you why people avoid touching that part of the boilerplate code: it's the one part of ren'py where the abstractions aren't well thought out. It's very fragile. To me, that makes DDLC all the more impressive from a technical point of view. It warps and abuses the most rigid and uncooperative part of the engine, and to great narrative effect.
I really enjoyed Roadwarden. Interesting take on an old fantasy genre and gave me “this is ancient history” vibes. I’m not usually into visual novels but beat this game. It’s available for under $3 right now, I am showing 20 hours played, totally worth it.
Yeah but its such a standout in there that i wouldnt even consider it part of that genre. It uses the same medium but does such crazy things with it that its nothing like any other visual novels
I really can't agree, there are so many great VNs out there and DDLC only really stands out in that it plays heavily to the English-speaking world's preconceived notions of VNs as "nothing more than simple dating simulators"
Games have ratings in virtually every country. The commercial version of DDLC, DDLC Plus is rated M in North America for 17+. The original free version lacks a rating because it was a free indie game. And the website has the line "This game is not suitable for children
or those who are easily disturbed."
DDLC borrowed a lot from YOU and ME and HER: A Love Story (Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi), which I consider generally superior to DDLC. I say this not to diminish DDLC, which is excellent, but as a plug for anyone who enjoyed DDLC and wants more mind warping content like that.
Convergent evolution. It’s probably just an amazing and fortuitous coincidence. They look similar but have completely different internal structure, like a bug that pretends to be a leaf. I can’t go any further without spoilers, so I won’t.
There might be a slim evolutionary thread between them, actually. DDLC made a reference to a certain Gravity Falls episode which has a similar premise by releasing exactly 3 years later, and that one could have been inspired by the then recent release of Totono during production.
But I agree it's convergence for the most part, it's not that hard to come up with that premise even if it hasn't been too common.
We do not need our hyperscaler minders telling us what content we can and cannot consume.
This ought to be grounds to litigate antitrust. This should not be happening.
We need web-based app installs without scare walls ("downloading from the internet is dangerous"), without hidden settings menus to enable them ("Settings > Apps > Special app access > Install unknown apps"), and without any interference or meddling from the hyperscalers.
Tyranny of defaults = 0.00001% of users will ever fall into these buckets = Google knows exactly the evil shit they're doing. Apple not even allowing it is almost less evil by contrast as they're not pretending.
These devices are too important for two companies to lord over us and tell us what to do.
I hope Lina Khan comes back, and I hope she has some absolute urgency next time. I also hope our pals in the EU and Asia put this shit to rest as well. No citizen of the world should have their devices cucking them like this. This is not what computing is supposed to be. (And let's not discount the fact that competition on these devices is in no way, shape, or form fair anymore. You're taxed to hell and back if you do distribution or outreach on these garrison states.)
These our our devices, Google and Apple. You do not get to control what happens after we buy them. You are both monopolies. You are both allelopathic parasites. Invasive species that have outgrown your ecosystem and invaded all the other ones. Doing damage to everything you touch.
The world needs a cleansing forest fire to restore healthy competition.
I’m generally with you, but I am not prepared to say companies should be forced to host and distribute content they believe reflects badly on them.
That and I don’t see how Google and Apple can both be monopolies in mobile. Is this the “Ford has a monopoly on Mustangs” argument? Never found that persuasive.
Now, reframe as duopoly, and maybe layer in that a platform owner who curates their App Store must allow alternative app stores on equal footing, and I’d be with you.
I don't think companies should be forced to do that in general, but there are some circumstances where I think they should.
A local printing company should not be forced to print things they don't want. But an ISP should be required to transport everything, with exceptions for legal requirements and legitimate network health measures, or get out of the ISP business.
App stores feel more like the latter to me. Especially Apple's where there's no way around it for the average user.
Agreed on the free speech versus common carrier aspects.
But I lean the other way with app stores. The companies hire reviewers, the listings appear in the App Store trade dress, it feels more like a museum or magazine than an ISP. But I get how reasonable people can disagree.
Maybe we need some formal choices: is this a curated App Store that reflects editorial judgment (in which case it must be possible to ship alternatives on equal footing), or is it a common carrier (in which case you can be the only game in town).
The ambiguity doesn’t help, and of course megacorps love shifting the frames depending on context.
I think your proposed choice would be a good way to go. If you really want to screen out malware or whatever by maintaining exclusivity over the distribution channel, then you need to otherwise provide an equal footing for all apps. If you really want to exercise editorial control and put your name front and center and reject apps that don't fit your brand, then you need to let other distributors exist.
> I’m generally with you, but I am not prepared to say companies should be forced to host and distribute content they believe reflects badly on them.
If Apple and Google are hell-bent on killing sideloading, and they control 99% of the mobile market, I think they have an obligation to host things they don't like, as long as it is legal.
I feel like this is captures the point very well. Google removing this software, means that for 99% of the users on the platform, the choice to play this gets taken away from user.
Well they are big enough to be called infrastructure now. Similar to payment providers. Them removing things essentially removes them from existence for 99 percent.
We need a cleansing forest fire of aggressive, effective antitrust enforcement. All we gotta do is enforce the laws that are already on the books, and do so in the spirit of the existing body of case law precedent.
If you only played it once without knowing the ending, I strongly recommend a second playthrough. Some dialogues and poems have a wildly different meaning once you know things.
Also, I fully recommend DDLP+ too. The extra stories don't have any real gameplay, but they are really good, and add.some depth to the characters.
Even it is wasn't good, it still is a problem to have Google as a gatekeeper. If they removed this, they removed other content unwanted by Google. It means their app store is inherently moderated and it means they are accountable for the content as well. That should extend to any app that scams their users, which includes also unwanted data extraction.
There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that trigger warnings have a positive effect and growing evidence they are either ineffectual or actually negative.
1bil+ people have surrendered their right to artistic expression to Google, and another 1bil+ to Apple, and another 1bil+ to Microsoft. Many more billions have surrendered it to Visa and Mastercard. The world will only continue to get worse for the foreseeable future as five corporations assert global control over what is allowed to be published. It is mournful knowing that humanity's peak is behind us.
[Spoilers] For those who haven't played, DDLC has subject matter related to self-harm, mental health, suicide that sort of thing. It generally treats the subjects seriously. It has content warnings on it, so people know what they are getting into.
Its weird how we seem much more hung up on censoring video games we are than books or movies. There is way more disturbing books and movies out there. If this was a book i doubt anyone would care. There probably wouldn't even be content warnings on it.
On the other hand, maybe someone trying to ban you is how you know you have achieved the status of "great literature" like all the other banned books.
Binding of Isaac is a game that takes hundreds of hours to beat, and worked well on iPad. It cost $15. It was removed and so Edmund McMillen the creator resolved to never publish on Apple platforms again. Disappointing for me because his new game is Windows only, but I can’t blame him.
I could have sworn there was a discussion about this years ago but I went looking for it on HN and just found a comment I made years ago, funny how that shakes out.
DDLC is a disturbing (good, but disturbing) game that opens as a bright cheerful one. So long as the description explained what the user is in for later on, I think Google shouldn't have done this. I haven't seen the Android version; I played it on PC, but as it is basically a "visual novel" I doubt there was very much difference between them.
My first reaction to this was that someone made a mistake somewhere. They saw the game title and the front page, assumed it was a porn game due to it's rating or whatever, or made some other assumption that doesn't hold up to even cursory research, which would confirm the game's had two releases, the former of which has 100k+ reviews on Steam, and the second of which was even physical on consoles.
But no. The post mentions it was pulled due to a TOS violation with regards to its depiction of 'sensitive themes'. That would seem to suggest the problem lies with the game depicting suicide or just its other depictions of mental health problems in general. It could still be a mistake, in that they researched it to the point that they figured out it was dealing with those themes, but not to the point of figuring out it's a successful darling of a game. This seems rather unlikely.
Either way, fact that it's even possible to pull from the store, several months after it was first published without issue, without at least having a chat with the publisher first, is worrying.
Aside from the comments on the rest of this thread, I’ll point out this unique point:
If this game’s content is objectionable, where was Google 5 months ago when it was released? Are they admitting that they don’t review apps that are submitted? Do their reviewers have zero familiarity with major multi-platform game releases?
How are they justifying the availability of the Grand Theft Auto or Resident Evil series on the Android platform if this game can’t be published?
Hopefully this turns out to be some kind of error or misunderstanding that gets corrected.
It's a relatively old game, so I'll put up here a spoiler so to remove potential confusion:
DDLC is a __horror__ game that contains some gore, death, and self harm content, as well as small fourth wall breaking, disguised as a Japanese Visual Novel style soft/hard porn game. The entire game is a figurative jumpscare. Which makes it technically true to call it a "disturbing and shocking" game, but not as in """disturbing and shocking""" as in the euphemism for pornographic. It is technically correctly rated and marked as such. It just doesn't say viewer discretion of what kind is recommended.
And also: a lot of these Japanese pastel colored things, Visual Novel games included, are in fact not intended for kids, especially under 15. It's not like picture books for 6-12 year olds. Audience gender distribution is often closer to 50:50 than what many assumes.
Doki Doki Literature Club is a game that I played, and then replayed, purely on the basis of recommendations by trusted reviewers. The genre (visual novel) and theme (anime pin-up schoolgirl) are ones that I have no interest in. I was extremely glad that I did play it, though; it was a profoundly thought-provoking experience. It was extremely disturbing in the best possible way.
Definitely not for kids, though, and it's worth taking the content/trigger warnings seriously.
DDLC is one of those once in a lifetime gaming experiences. Like most people commenting - I had no interest in the style or genre, but I am immensely glad I played it!
I distinctly remember sitting there in silence with my mouth open at a number of points during the game.
I went down the ~~MONIKA~_ route, though I was intrigued by %]~JUST_MONIKA%]€_ - She seemed like an interesting character.
This is a great game especially on PC. I don't know if the hidden files are available on mobile, but it was a great dive into hiding data in plain sight, with the game files, from decoding binary hidden in images, to spectrograph QR codes hidden in audio. Friend recommended the game to me and I'll never forgive them, only Monika.
Google and Apple know better than you what you want to play and what you want to do on your phone.
Visa and Mastercard know better than you what you want to buy.
Don't disagree with them, because they're only doing this for your own good.
Let's not mince words. Whoever made this call is a lily-livered, paternalistic chickenshit startled by their own shadow. A nasty case of moral cowardice, coupled to poor judgement, to no-one's benefit.
For those of us who didn't know the game but want to try it due to the Streisand effect, is there an official APK download? Since it's free on Steam, I thought the official website might list an APK, but I haven't found anything other than the Play link.
weird situation regardless. this came out like a decade ago, and while there is a serious undertone, this has been widely discussed during the original virality period.
funnily enough one of the largest Youtubers made a gameplay video of the desktop game [1]. don't believe anything was modified when the port was made. hope this gets resolved just like the recent wireshark fiasco.
Self-harm (especially when depicting minors) has special standards. The recent court ruling on child safety against Meta probably led directly to this decision.
(spoiler) The conspiracy seeking part of my brain is fascinated by the fact a company whose decisions are increasingly ai made or moderated doesn't want people to play a game that requires deleting a psychotic stalker off your hard drive...
If you want to play bishoujoge, just play the PC version so you don't have to deal with things being censored. The Play Store and App Store do not allow R18 images so the games have to be censored.
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It's an amazing "playable story" unlike anything I have ever played. Super creative and well worth the couple hours it takes to play. I think it could use a few trigger warnings and it should be rated PG-13 / R, but there's stuff on Netflix 10x more disturbing so I don't quite grok the Google push back on this one.
> I think it could use a few trigger warnings
Doesn't DDLC start with the following?
> This game is not suitable for those who are easily disturbed. Individuals suffering from anxiety or depression may not have a safe experience playing this game. For content warnings, please visit https://ddlc.moe/warning.
Then the plus version even added in-game content warnings?
https://teamsalvato.com/news/updates-to-content-warnings-in-...
Also, the game is rated PEGI 18, USK 18, M, CERO C, in various countries.
Doki Doki was created with the Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine by the way.
Plenty of games do amazing things with ren'py that you wouldn't think were possible just by looking at the dialogue DSL. Maps, HUDs, minigames, incredibly dynamic pathways through the game. But DDLC takes it to a different level, partly by looking so "normal" on its surface.
In college I made some spare cash writing Ren'py games for some creatives online who had the writing and illustration chops, but needed programming help. At the time, DDLC was the model for great game design in Ren'Py. There are plenty of more technically impressive Ren'py games nowadays, but DDLC is still a terrific example of technical sophistication facilitating the story.
Ren'py is awesome by the way. A tour de force of software design, in my opinion.
It breaks the fourth wall in unexpected, and deeply unsettling ways.
As a gamer you take for granted that, at any moment, you can simply exit. The UI is a trustworthy boundary between the imagined world of a horror game, and the comfort of reality. In DDLC, you don't even feel safe on the title screen.
Most ren'py games, even the very good ones, barely change the UI at all. Roadwarden doesn't look like a ren'py game at all... until you open the save menu, and then it looks exactly like a ren'py game. Having developed ren'py games, I can tell you why people avoid touching that part of the boilerplate code: it's the one part of ren'py where the abstractions aren't well thought out. It's very fragile. To me, that makes DDLC all the more impressive from a technical point of view. It warps and abuses the most rigid and uncooperative part of the engine, and to great narrative effect.
People have made some pretty slick turn-based combat systems. Some deck builders, others more spellcasting/mana oriented.
And it's renpy so like 80% of the games are straight up porn, so I'm not naming a single one here lol.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1155970/Roadwarden/
http://ahatestory.com/
Games are still seen as something children engage in despite the average gamers being adults.
But I agree it's convergence for the most part, it's not that hard to come up with that premise even if it hasn't been too common.
This ought to be grounds to litigate antitrust. This should not be happening.
We need web-based app installs without scare walls ("downloading from the internet is dangerous"), without hidden settings menus to enable them ("Settings > Apps > Special app access > Install unknown apps"), and without any interference or meddling from the hyperscalers.
Tyranny of defaults = 0.00001% of users will ever fall into these buckets = Google knows exactly the evil shit they're doing. Apple not even allowing it is almost less evil by contrast as they're not pretending.
These devices are too important for two companies to lord over us and tell us what to do.
I hope Lina Khan comes back, and I hope she has some absolute urgency next time. I also hope our pals in the EU and Asia put this shit to rest as well. No citizen of the world should have their devices cucking them like this. This is not what computing is supposed to be. (And let's not discount the fact that competition on these devices is in no way, shape, or form fair anymore. You're taxed to hell and back if you do distribution or outreach on these garrison states.)
These our our devices, Google and Apple. You do not get to control what happens after we buy them. You are both monopolies. You are both allelopathic parasites. Invasive species that have outgrown your ecosystem and invaded all the other ones. Doing damage to everything you touch.
The world needs a cleansing forest fire to restore healthy competition.
That and I don’t see how Google and Apple can both be monopolies in mobile. Is this the “Ford has a monopoly on Mustangs” argument? Never found that persuasive.
Now, reframe as duopoly, and maybe layer in that a platform owner who curates their App Store must allow alternative app stores on equal footing, and I’d be with you.
> That and I don’t see how Google and Apple can both be monopolies in mobile.
Why not? Monopolies can be market-specific, and Apple does indeed fully control the market of iOS app distribution.
Whether they also are a monopolist on mobile operating systems, smartphones etc. is a separate question.
> I am not prepared to say companies should be forced to host and distribute content they believe reflects badly on them.
Me neither, but in turn I don't think they should be allowed to act as the sole distributor for their respective platforms.
A local printing company should not be forced to print things they don't want. But an ISP should be required to transport everything, with exceptions for legal requirements and legitimate network health measures, or get out of the ISP business.
App stores feel more like the latter to me. Especially Apple's where there's no way around it for the average user.
But I lean the other way with app stores. The companies hire reviewers, the listings appear in the App Store trade dress, it feels more like a museum or magazine than an ISP. But I get how reasonable people can disagree.
Maybe we need some formal choices: is this a curated App Store that reflects editorial judgment (in which case it must be possible to ship alternatives on equal footing), or is it a common carrier (in which case you can be the only game in town).
The ambiguity doesn’t help, and of course megacorps love shifting the frames depending on context.
> I’m generally with you, but I am not prepared to say companies should be forced to host and distribute content they believe reflects badly on them.
If Apple and Google are hell-bent on killing sideloading, and they control 99% of the mobile market, I think they have an obligation to host things they don't like, as long as it is legal.
There's platforms, and there's Apple and Google.
You don't need to say "platforms" when you talk about the two companies that control the 99.99999% of the mobile ecosystem.
Also, I fully recommend DDLP+ too. The extra stories don't have any real gameplay, but they are really good, and add.some depth to the characters.
> I think it could use a few trigger warnings
There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that trigger warnings have a positive effect and growing evidence they are either ineffectual or actually negative.
[Spoilers] For those who haven't played, DDLC has subject matter related to self-harm, mental health, suicide that sort of thing. It generally treats the subjects seriously. It has content warnings on it, so people know what they are getting into.
Its weird how we seem much more hung up on censoring video games we are than books or movies. There is way more disturbing books and movies out there. If this was a book i doubt anyone would care. There probably wouldn't even be content warnings on it.
On the other hand, maybe someone trying to ban you is how you know you have achieved the status of "great literature" like all the other banned books.
I could have sworn there was a discussion about this years ago but I went looking for it on HN and just found a comment I made years ago, funny how that shakes out.
(reference https://www.engadget.com/gaming/steam-now-bans-games-that-vi...)
But no. The post mentions it was pulled due to a TOS violation with regards to its depiction of 'sensitive themes'. That would seem to suggest the problem lies with the game depicting suicide or just its other depictions of mental health problems in general. It could still be a mistake, in that they researched it to the point that they figured out it was dealing with those themes, but not to the point of figuring out it's a successful darling of a game. This seems rather unlikely.
Either way, fact that it's even possible to pull from the store, several months after it was first published without issue, without at least having a chat with the publisher first, is worrying.
If this game’s content is objectionable, where was Google 5 months ago when it was released? Are they admitting that they don’t review apps that are submitted? Do their reviewers have zero familiarity with major multi-platform game releases?
How are they justifying the availability of the Grand Theft Auto or Resident Evil series on the Android platform if this game can’t be published?
Hopefully this turns out to be some kind of error or misunderstanding that gets corrected.
DDLC is a __horror__ game that contains some gore, death, and self harm content, as well as small fourth wall breaking, disguised as a Japanese Visual Novel style soft/hard porn game. The entire game is a figurative jumpscare. Which makes it technically true to call it a "disturbing and shocking" game, but not as in """disturbing and shocking""" as in the euphemism for pornographic. It is technically correctly rated and marked as such. It just doesn't say viewer discretion of what kind is recommended.
And also: a lot of these Japanese pastel colored things, Visual Novel games included, are in fact not intended for kids, especially under 15. It's not like picture books for 6-12 year olds. Audience gender distribution is often closer to 50:50 than what many assumes.
(I've never played it.)
Definitely not for kids, though, and it's worth taking the content/trigger warnings seriously.
I distinctly remember sitting there in silence with my mouth open at a number of points during the game.
I went down the ~~MONIKA~_ route, though I was intrigued by %]~JUST_MONIKA%]€_ - She seemed like an interesting character.
Google can suck on a lemon.
It's very clearly intended for teens+.
It's disgusting, really, that most of the world is totally fine with this. Most people probably don't even realize how bad this is.
funnily enough one of the largest Youtubers made a gameplay video of the desktop game [1]. don't believe anything was modified when the port was made. hope this gets resolved just like the recent wireshark fiasco.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYH8WvNV1YEnYtfmH-sGR...
Provide the content, content provider
Which invites censorship from morality police types.
Meanwhile the people that lead them go to certain islands.