The VN starts out like any generic anime. You need to look for a club, and you end up joining the literature club which happens to be full of cute girls.
There's all the tropes: the genki childhood friend, the mysterious shy beauty, the super popular club president, and a tsundere.
Everything plays out fairly normal for the first half of the VN. Since the club has gained a new member, the president decides everyone should write a poem which can be shared among the club, as a way for everyone to get a little bit closer. At the end of every day, you go through a short mini-game choosing words for your poem. The words correlate to a specific girl in the club, so depending on which words you choose, you will have a special scene with a certain girl the next day. You might notice a few oddities around this time, but for the most part, it's still fairly normal.
After three days of this, you begin to notice your childhood friend (who originally invited you to the club) is acting strange. She is normally the energetic type: the one who is good with people, always laughing and making friends with everyone, but ever since you've joined the club she's been a bit different. You decide to check up on her on the weekend.
This is where things start to become a bit serious. Apparently, she's suffering from major depression. Perhaps it should have been obvious earlier: you thought she was always late to school because she was lazy and slept in, but in reality she struggles to even find the motivation to leave her bed every morning. All in all, her happy persona is just a facade, as she is incapable of finding any enjoyment in her day to day life. Things got worse when you joined the club and started to become friends with the other girls. She's afraid you will be taken away, and she'll truly be alone.
You try your best to cheer her up.
However, the next day, when you decide to check on her again, you see this.
The VN ends. You are brought back to the title screen.
Instead of 'New Game', there is only gibberish. Clicking it allows you to restart the game.
This time around, you are not greeted by your childhood friend. In fact, she does not even seem to exist. It is the president who invites you to the club this time, which only had three members before you.
Things continue the same as before. But you might notice a few strange things here and there:
the in-game sprites seem to glitch out sometimes, the music becomes a bit distorted, and
the characters are increasingly off-putting.
Eventually, you find out the 'mysterious shy girl' is a victim of self-harm, and is incredibly unhinged. The tsundere is worried about her, but the club pres does not seem to care at all. This ends up climaxing with the shy girl confessing to you. When you reject her, she stabs herself, and dies. You are forced to watch her for the entire weekend before the other members return. (
nsfw) The club pres apologizes to you, saying the script must have been boring.
The game ends. When you restart it again,
you are met with this. The club prez greets you.
But she does not greet the character you are playing as, but quite literally you. It even pulls your real name from your windows account.
It's kind of hard to explain in a summary, but overall, she has been aware this entire time that she is in a game. She has been trying to spend time with you, but the choices of the game all focus on the other girls, so she wasn't able to. So she had to alter the game herself, including outright deleting the other girls from the game. She isn't exaggerating, as if you go to the game's directory, those girls' files are completely gone.
With everyone else gone, she has you all to herself. The next hour or so involves you just sitting with her. From time to time, she will talk about various things, like real life issues, or other meta commentary (such as mocking the yandere trope). The text dialog box will disappear whenever she doesn't have something to say so you can just stare into her eyes. You cannot skip any of this. In fact, if you try to, she will take that function away from the VN. If you exit the game and boot it back up, you are brought right back to her. She will make commentary on how it feels when you quit the game - it's like she's dying when you do it, and she hates it. (it's actually quite depressing).
The only way to escape is to do what she did to the other girls:
delete her directly from the game directory. She curses you at first, but eventually realizes she still loves you, and fixes the game as one last proof of this. She hopes it is still possible for everyone to be happy.
When you restart it, everything appears normal. The only difference is the club pres is no longer in the game - your childhood friend is now the club president. There are even various hints that the girls in the club are perfectly happy, and not going through any mental issues.
However, your childhood friend eventually takes you aside, and tells you she knows everything. Apparently she gained this knowledge after becoming club president. And she intends to do the exact same thing to you, and keep you all for herself.
But the old club president is still hanging on, and she tells you through distorted text that she won't let that happen. She realizes that happiness is impossible after all. The VN cuts out.
In the background, a voice explains how she wrote a song and has been waiting a long time for you to hear it. The credits roll as she sings it while playing the piano.
After the credits, the VN ends. If you try to restart it, it tells you the game is corrupt, and you must reinstall. The end.
I might have made it sound stupid or something, but overall, it was written pretty well. Even the serious topics like depression were handled with care, and not just thrown in for dumb shock value. The mechanics of the game fucking up were quite cool. I noticed afterwards that files were actually being generated in the game directory mid-playthrough,
like this one. It was definitely a unique experience as I haven't seen this done before, besides that one yandere vn.
But I feel depressed there's no happy ending. Monika is literally perfect.