The protagonist (who is named by the player) is invited by his cheerful best friend,
Sayori, to join their high school's literature club as a remedy for his introverted nature. At the end of each day, the members are prompted to write a poem and share it with the other members the next day. Eventually, as the club prepares for the school's upcoming
cultural festival in which the members intend to share their poems with a wider audience, Sayori reveals to the protagonist that she has
depression. The protagonist assists either Yuri or Natsuki with their tasks, Natsuki with baking cupcakes and Yuri with painting banners respectively, each of them attempting to kiss the protagonist before he encounters Sayori again. The protagonist can either
confess his love to Sayori or
reaffirm his friendship with her. Regardless of the player's choice, the following day, Monika passively shows the protagonist an uncharacteristically morbid poem by Sayori, whose contents are merely endless instances of "get out of my head". Realizing that something has happened to Sayori, the protagonist rushes to her home, only to find that she has
hanged herself, and the game abruptly ends. Upon starting a new game, the story repeats itself, but Sayori is glaringly absent and the other characters do not remember her existence, including the protagonist. Monika introduces the protagonist to the club in lieu of Sayori. Events proceed similarly to the original playthrough, but some text is
rendered illegible, the character sprites undergo sporadic distortions, and what appears to be computer glitches become commonplace. Aside from the game's frequent distortions, it is revealed through dialogue and unlockable "special poems" that Natsuki is malnourished and being abused by her father; meanwhile, Yuri gradually becomes unstable,
obsessive, and prone to
self-harm. Though still self-aware, Sayori instead expresses her gratitude to the player for emotionally supporting all the members; tearfully bids farewell, and assures the player that all the members love them. Monika then plays "Your Reality" during the credits without deleting the game. After the game locks, the player is presented with a message from the game's developer, Dan Salvato, describing his intentions behind creating the game and his opinions on
video games as a whole. He then thanks the player for playing the game and joining the club as the game closes. A premature ending occurs if the player preemptively deletes Monika's file from the directory prior to starting a new game, which will cause Sayori to become the default leader of the club. Upon realizing the true nature of the game and her role in it, Sayori panics and inadvertently closes the game. Opening the game again will display an image of Sayori having hanged herself; if the image is left on-screen for 10 minutes, the words "now everyone can be happy" will appear next to it.
Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! In addition to the entire main story,
Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! features six new side stories, entitled
Trust,
Understanding,
Respect,
Balance,
Reflection, and
Self-Love, as well as an additional shorter seventh story,
Equals. The stories depict the meeting and relationships between the four club members, as well as the formation of the club up until the beginning of the main campaign, with each of the first six stories focusing on a conflict and resolution between two of the characters and the seventh focusing on the friendship between all four of them. Unlike the main campaign, the side stories do not feature any horror elements or discussion of sentience among any of the characters. As a fictionalized account of how the game was developed, other story-related content is accessible from within the virtual desktop in the form of an email inbox for a company referred to as "Metaverse Enterprise Solutions", as well as within the virtual desktop file folder. Collecting this content tells of a group of researchers from the company who were attempting to utilize a virtual machine referred to as "VM1" to create a simulated universe. The resulting universe contained four entities, one of whom, "A", is granted elevated permissions to access the kernel code, referred to as "Monitor Kernel Access". The universe and entities are studied during events paralleling those of the game's main campaign, and the emails and files discuss the researcher's observations and monitoring of the events, with the stated goal being to observe how "A" would react to the discovery of their artificial existence, to analyze the possibility of the true universe being a simulation. Later discussion is given on the creation of a second "control" universe within VM1, in which "A" is not made aware of their elevated permissions, paralleling the events and settings of the side stories. It is later mentioned that a small group of researchers, who initially refer to themselves as "Team Salvation", plan to transform the contents of VM1 into a visual novel format to ensure the security of the project, implying that the events of
Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! depict the contents of both universes within VM1. The last unlockable email describes a second virtual machine, "VM2", which the researchers successfully built but could not reliably access due to its instability. While they are unable to create a reliable connection to VM2, the researchers observe that the entities within VM2 appeared to be working on an undescribed project, referred to as "Project Libitina", which is implied to be an attempt by the entities to access the world beyond their simulated universe. If the player completes full "data collection", which requires completing all game content and unlocking all secrets, they are granted access to an eighth side story entitled
test.vm, which consists only of a screen describing a failed server attempt at accessing VM2, alongside one of several hundred different randomly-selected sentences, which appear to describe the world and activities within VM2's universe. ==Development==