Doki Doki Literature Club Plus is a captivating mix between a horror game and 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 joins 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?
Doki Doki Literature Club Endings Explained
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.
In the normal ending, Sayori appears and thanks the player for deleting Monika, the antagonist who's caused quite a bit of trouble because of her jealousy toward the other girls by the end. Unfortunately, Monika is actually still there, but realizes how miserable being the president of the Doki Doki Literature Club makes people, which culminates in her decision to delete the game once and for all to spare others the pain of self-awareness.
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. If her character is deleted ASAP, Sayori also deletes every other character file, and loading the game will only show the scene of Sayori hanging herself. Progression after this is impossible without resetting Doki Doki Literature Club Plus.
For the good ending, the game essentially needs to be 100% completed, which involves messing around with save files since it needs to be done before Sayori commits suicide. After doing this, the ending resembles the "normal" ending except it's Sayori who deletes the files, not Monika. She also appears to thank the player for trying to bring happiness to everyone in the club, and instead of a letter from Monika at the end, it's a letter from the developer thanking the player for achieving Doki Doki Literature Club's special ending.