Visual Novel / John Doe

John Doe is a surreal horror visual novel/dating sim-style game made by Fox (who also made Purple). The game is quite short, with 7 endings which can all be achieved in about 15 minutes.

You play You, a cashier at a gas station. On your way to work, you meet John Doe, a strange fellow with an unsettling aura and weird habits. At this point, it's up to you whether you decide to "romance" him or not... at your own risk, of course.

The game can be downloaded here.

John Doe contains examples of:

• Aerith and Bob: The player character is literally named You, while John Doe's name is sinisterly generic.
• Ambiguous Gender: The protagonist has no specified gender.
• Amnesiac Hero: Invoked. The protagonist is in a temporal loop of getting introduced to John Doe over and over again. On each of these introductions, they do not remember who John Doe is.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: John seems to have this. He comes off as creepy, pushy, and invasive, as he comments on your body odor, follows you around despite your insistence otherwise, and has No Sense of Personal Space. He also notably enjoys it when he scares you, but also seems to want You to like being frightened by him, implying that he conflates fear and love. Given his Humanoid Abomination status, it's unclear how genuinely malicious his intentions actually are. He does claim to "love" the player, and whether the player dies, gets trapped, or is left in peace is based on arbitrary small actions and responses to his weirdness, including whether you've showered that day. It's never specified if John is a Yandere that "loves" You in a possessive and violent way, or conflates love with violence and genuinely can't tell the difference.
  • John Doe Plus and its extra endings clear this up a bit, with John's redesign giving him a far more approachable appearance and personality and more insight into his thoughts. His earlier pushiness and invasiveness can be somewhat explained by his awareness that he's inside of a game and has met You over and over again, and his amicability is yet another way to win you over. It's still unclear on whether his outbursts into eldritch madness come from frustration or losing his ability to maintain the illusion.
• The Cameo: You has a poster of Randall Purpura from Purple in his room.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: One of John's distinguishing features is his head of long, messy, and tangled black hair. It hints that, right off the bat, he's clearly unhinged and creepy and not entirely human.
• Expressive Shirt: The red pattern on John Doe's shirt varies between a smiley face, a spiral, a heart, and a few other shapes. It also forms into text in some scenes as well.
• Fan Disservice: The moments in which John's jacket is removed or slipped off coincide with the game's more creepy moments. More of a downplayed example, as not much extra skin is exposed.
• Four-Fingered Hands: John Doe himself is a Zig-Zagged example of this trope; most of the art in the game depicts him with only four fingers on each hand, but his design in the 5th, 6th, and 7th ending routes give him five fingers on each hand.
• Game Face: When John Doe drops his disguise of normalcy in the 5th ending, you are greeted to quite a lovely display.
• Gift-Giving Gaffe: John Doe leaves you a "gift" in your house, which can only be described as something red, meaty and squishy. When he hands it to you in person in ending 4, it's censored. Every time You sees it, they are notably disgusted and horrified.
• Humanoid Abomination: John Doe himself. He looks like a very disheveled and pale human man with long messy hair, and has a constant smile on his face. His shirt also somehow changes depending on his mood, he's attracted to your scent, and has the ability to break the fourth wall to affect your decisions and make you follow what he wants. He also ends up transporting you to his house/pocket dimension while you are completely unaware, and he can apparently remember decisions from other routes.
  • John Doe Plus also gives him the ability to change himself into a cuter form to win you over. When he reverts to his original self, the cute art style exclusive to Plus changes back to its surreal AI-generated backgrounds, implying that whatever John is, he has the ability (unconsciously or not) to manipulate reality.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: John seems to conflate affection with violence, and shows his "love" for You with increasingly unhinged tactics. He'll give you a gift of something that's vaguely implied to be a bloody organ, and Ending 2 also demonstrates that if you show him too much attention, he becomes violent, stabs you, and starts drinking your blood. Whenever he's presented with an opportunity to have you all for himself, he quickly devolves into creepier behavior.
  • John Doe Plus reveals ending 7, which doesn't end badly for once. John reverts to his real form and asks how you feel about him, and when you say yes and talk about your feelings with him, You mentions that John shouldn't pretend to be something that he isn't and should just be forward with his feelings, which seems to curb his violent behavior.
• Lacerating Love Language: In the 2nd ending, John Doe shows his love for You... by stabbing You over and over again... and kissing Your bloody body.
• Meaningful Name: The name "John" is an incredibly generic English name for men, which contrasts heavily with the creepy Ambiguously Human weirdo who spends the game stalking you. However, the full alias "John Doe" is often a term used for unidentified corpses in police investigations, which give a deeply sinister meaning to John's existence, as if he's trying to stay below suspicion.
  • You is literally an Audience Surrogate.
  John: That's definitely one of the names I've heard.
• Minimalist Cast: The only characters seen are You and John Doe.
• Multiple Endings: Four of them:
  • Ending 1, "Doe Loved You": When you accept only some of John's requests and don't let him follow you home. He breaks in and proclaims his love for you against your will. This then leads you into ending 4.
  • Ending 2, "Doe Really Loved You": When you don't take a shower and accept all of John's requests, he breaks into your home and murders you while proclaiming his love.
  • Ending 3, "Doe Lost Interest": In this ending, when you refuse all of John's advances and take a shower, you discover a disgusting "gift" that he left in your home, but he otherwise loses interest and leaves you alone.
  • Ending 4, "YES": The entire route has your behavior altered to accept all of John's requests against your will, and he remembers everything from Ending 1. It ends with you trapped in his distorted pocket dimension against your will.
  • John Doe Plus gives us three more endings:
    • Ending 5, "Personal Time": You go home with a much more normal looking John Doe, with only small hints at his true nature. when you take him home and watch TV together, he reverts back to his old self and is implied to keep you trapped with him forever.
    • Ending 6, "Abandoned", ends with John reverting back to his real form and insisting that he can be whatever you want. You reject him, and the scene ends with John begging to not be left alone, implying that he is aware he's inside of a game, and becoming a sad, crying mess as the game ends.
    • Ending 7, "Dream Come True": It plays out like ending 5, but You agrees that they love John, though not when he's pretending to be something he isn't. Both characters acknowledge that they are stuck in a time loop, and might as well see what happens, with John looking up at the player with hearts in his eyes before it cuts to black.
• No Social Skills: John is incredibly pushy when you first meet him, insisting that the two of you are best friends simply because you know each other's names. He's also quite invasive and loves giving you unwarranted compliments about your scent. That being said, while most of John's awkwardness seems unintentional, he is fully aware that you are unsettled by him and notably enjoys making you scared. Strangely enough, he wants You to enjoy being scared by him.
  John: I like when you're scared. Do you like being scared?
  You (when John controls your dialogue options): YES, I LOVE IT. SCARE ME, DOE. SCARE ME MORE.
  • John Doe Plus extrapolates this when John changes himself into a cuter form to trick you into liking him, implying that John's previously creepy behavior is something he cannot control, even if his end goal in both form is the same. While much more approachable and eloquent, he still has moments of creepiness in his cuter form and is genuinely confused as to why you don't return his feelings.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: John wears all black, has long black hair, with a bright red smiley face on his shirt, which stands out even more since he's an Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette. While it's unclear if John is necessarily evil, he's still a creepy Ambiguously Human stalker whose not afraid to harm you, and his appearance is an indicator that what you see is what you get.
• Perverted Sniffing: Implied with John. When you don't shower in a run, he mentions that you smell good.
• Perpetual Smiler: John is the insane variant. He has a constant manic grin that never goes away, even when he's saying or doing something incredibly frightening or doesn't like your responses.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Played With. When John Doe first appears in a more human-like appearance at the begining of the 5th, 6th, and 7th ending routes, he's got some pretty heavy Morphic Resonance. You even comments that he looks familar during their ride at the train station. John Doe doesn't even bother to change his alias! However, You doesn't initially pick up on the disguise because they had lost their memory of the previous day.
• Stalker with a Crush: John is a creepy, awkward weirdo who is clearly obsessed with You, and pulls all of the stops; following You home, commenting on their scent, leaving unwanted "gifts" at their home, and breaking into their house. In ending 2, John ends up killing You and drinking their blood after picking ALL of the actions he likes, while in endings 1 and 4, he breaks into You's home and, in the latter case, traps You in his house/pocket dimension.
  • John Doe Plus tones this down and makes him far less blatantly creepy in both appearance and personality, giving John a far more amicable and nicer appearance and personality at first. Bits of his otherworldliness start to peek through on occasion, before he fully reverts to his old horrific self. However, he is also given some explanation to his earlier creepiness; he's aware that he's in a game and has interacted with you multiple times, so he has been trying to win you over again and again to no avail.
• Stylistic Suck: A rare horror example. The backgrounds you and John inhabit are all created by Neuralblender, an AI software, rather than being drawn images or stock photos. As a result, the backgrounds look dreamy and confusing, with familiar textures that give hints to what it's supposed to resemble but still looking very obviously wrong.
  • John Doe Plus averts this by making the backgrounds fully drawn and making John's design far less unsettling until it reverts as John goes back to his true self.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: John gains the ability to alter your decision making heavily in Ending 4, making you agree to all of his creepy requests. It's heavily implied that because you took the comparatively "amicable" route with him in Ending 1 and he manages to get into your house, that he takes it as an invite to do it again.
  • John Doe Plus goes even further with this with the reveal that John is aware that he's in a game and that his interactions with You are repeating over and over again. In ending 7, You acknowledges this too and decides to stay and love John.
• Uncanny Valley: Fittingly, the game literally takes place in a location known as the Uncanny Valley. John Doe's design deliberately invokes this feel; he looks like a human at first glance, but his design quickly steps into Ambiguously Human territory when you see his wide-open eyes and absurd amount of teeth.
• The Unpronounceable: When You is first meets John Doe at the gas station, he tells the player his real name, which is just a bunch of white noise, but then he just says you can call him John Doe.

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