Visual Novel / Doki Doki Salvation

Please note that this page and the Game Mod it covers contain MAJOR spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club! If you have not played that game, it is strongly recommended that you do so before reading this page or playing the mod, as doing either first is very likely to ruin your experience.

Salvation is subjective. It really just depends on your circumstances in life.
When a reality is taken away from you, you're thrown into an endless abyss of pain, suffering, and horror...
Your body tends to take over and switch to survival mode, all in attempts to break
free its torture prison.
So... in a way... this outcome was MY salvation. As I'm sure it was yours.
Thank you for making the Literatur Club an amazing place. I'll keep you tucked away in my heart, always.

Doki Doki Salvation is a fan-made Game Mod of Doki Doki Literature Club! conceived by 12Gizguy6 as a goodbye to the DDLC community. It begins with Monika finding herself unable to delete characters, and the main character finding Sayori about to hang herself and talking her down from it. Things proceed from there as the main character arranges help for his friends.

The mod focuses heavily on Sayori, who eventually becomes the Main Character's girlfriend.

You can download it here for free.

This mod contains examples of the following tropes:

• Abusive Dad: Natsuki's father's idea of feeding her is ketchup and rice, and you actually see the bruises he leaves on her arm.
• Adapted Out: The poem minigame is completely excised in this mod. There is a reference to it, in that every poem by the main character starts with a list of words used in the meat of the poem.
• Adults Are Useless: Averted; the main character tells someone who works at the hospital about Sayori's depression, and a counselor is arranged for her. It seems to be doing her some good.
• Art Shift: As expected, original scenes are not in the original game's style.
• Ascended Extra: In the original game, Sayori was only prominent in Act I, disappeared after that, and only briefly returned in the final act. Here, she's by far the most prominent girl, on top of being the Main Character's only Love Interest. To emphasize this, the title screen is Sayori with chibi versions of the other girls.
• Beach Episode: Sayori and the main character go to the beach and play around until a storm brews.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Sayori and the main character become partners.
• Demoted to Extra: Not only does this game pushes Sayori front and center, it removes Monika from the game for a very large chunk of the story that she has to spend in a hospital room after a car accident. This being DDLC, and Monika being Monika, she doesn't like this one bit, and tries her hardest to escape this trope. When everything she tries fails, she's Driven to Suicide.
• Dramatic Irony: In the original game, Monika dials up Sayori's depression to the point she ends up killing herself. In this mod, it's actually Monika who ends up trying to kill herself. And just like Sayori, she also leaves one last poem as a suicide note.
• Driven to Suicide: Ironically, Monika ends up trying to kill herself.
  • In the Bad Ending where she succeeds in taking her own life, Sayori gains the former's Medium Awareness and, having experienced her friend's anguish firsthand, is broken to the point of wishing to kill herself once more, thus rendering the events of the story All for Nothing.
• Eye Catch: Some scene transitions feature a red bow turning into a purple book, then turning into a pink cupcake, then turning into a green musical note, before turning into a red bow again.
• Friendly Tickle Torture: Sayori and the main character enact this on each other at the beach... until Sayori kicks him for tickling her while she's underwater.
• Forgiven, but Not Forgotten: In the Good Ending, the cast opt to forgive Monika for her misdeeds and all share a group hug. Despite this, things are left unbearably tense, with none of them speaking to each other or responding to Monika in the club meetings. It takes another four weeks before anyone's in a place where they can talk to Monika and clear the air.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Monika is frustrated over her losing the ability to manipulate reality as she sees fit, mentioning how the game feels different than usual. It does, because it's actually a mod.
• Get a Room!: Natsuki's reaction whenever Sayori and the Main Character get overly affectionate.
• Heal the Cutie: The whole point of the mod. Little by little, Sayori goes from a depressed, broken mess of a girl that was this close to end her life, to a strong and genuinely happy girl that can bring the best out of others.
• Hopeless Suitor: In the good ending, Monika concedes that she's pretty much this. Otherwise, you wouldn't be playing a mod focusing on Sayori.
• Lighter and Softer: There are many, many heartwarming moments, as well as the fact that nearly all of the girls are helped, and all of them can be.
• Ms. Fanservice: You can see Sayori wearing a bikini during the aforementioned Beach Episode.
• Multiple Endings: After Monika falls to despair over her actions in manipulating the other characters' lives, she attempts to take her own life by shooting herself. This fails due to old ammo, and the main character takes the gun. Soon after, you can choose to let her try again:
  • If you let her try again, this time she succeeds. This has the effect of Natsuki and Yuri leaving the Literature Club, which the Main Character and Sayori are struggling to keep alive. And upon Monika's death, Sayori gained her Medium Awareness, and realizing how much she was suffering, said that she didn't deserve to die and that the Main Character shouldn't have let her kill herself, with the heavy implication that Sayori herself has relapsed into her suicidal tendencies.
  • If you take the gun away from her, Monika will have a breakdown about how much suffering her Medium Awareness brought her, and how much she regrets making the other girls' lives miserable because they thought they weren't real. The girls forgive Monika and promise to help her in any way they can, but their relationship during the next week is incredibly tense as well, and it isn't until Yuri offers her some small talk that things begin to improve. Eventually, their emotional wounds heal, the girls hold a friendly baking competition, and Sayori and the Main Character's relationship keeps growing stronger.
• Precision F-Strike: Natsuki calls Monika a "fucking bitch" when she finds out that Monika was the one behind all the other girls' suffering.
• Reconstruction: The mod reconstructs several tropes the original game deconstructed:
  • The mod reconstructs Medium Awareness. Sure, the thought that they live inside a videogame and aren't real people is distressing for all parts involved. That doesn't make their experiences, relationships, feelings, etc, anymore fake to them than they were before, and the hell Monika put them through felt very real to them, with Monika eventually learning that, just because they're video game characters doesn't make them "fake", and most importantly, that they can still be her friends.
  • No, Sayori's depression isn't going to go away just because she hooked up with her crush. But having a loving boyfriend that gives her plenty of emotional support definitely helps.
• Sanity Slippage: As if she wasn't already unstable enough, Sayori being rescued and officially hooking up with the MC causes Monika to become even more of a Yandere before she has a Villainous BSoD and crosses the Despair Event Horizon
• Shout-Out:
  • After the Beach Episode, Sayori wants to take a shower in order to get rid of all the sand in her body, since "it's coarse, rough, irritating and gets everywhere".
  • When watching anime with Sayori, you can choose between D is For Dragon, Yellow Haired Ninja, Caped Baldy, What a beautiful duwang, Magicka, and Redo Life.
• Shown Their Work: Doki Doki Salvation doesn't pretend that the girls' issues are easily dealt with, or brought up.
  • The only time the type of tea Yuri brings is mentioned is to their club's group therapy session. It's saffron tea, which, while this effect isn't mentioned in the novel, is known to be an antidepressant.
  • The gun near the end is a real, if antiquated, Japanese firearm.
• Villainous BSoD: Monika, when she realizes the MC is genuinely happier with Sayori than he would be with her.
• Yandere: Monika, even more than in canon, as she becomes more unhinged when all her efforts to delete the other girls, manipulate the game and draw the player's attention constantly fail.