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Project Libitina is an up-coming (as stated in 2017) horror project of indeterminate medium. In its current state, it has a couple references and a website. Despite its unfinished state, you still will be able to find plenty of information rooted inside of both of the Doki Doki Literature Club games. In this paper, I will go over this information. Let us begin with the website, shall we?
Projectlibitina.com is a simple text-based pure HTML website that consists of an imitation of a classified document of a test subject. This test subject is Libitina, born January 5th, 2001, and the tests were taken on January 5th of 2004, making her 3 years old. She is held in room 114, wing A. The tests are on general physical assessment, such as BMI, pain tolerance, heart rate, and likewise. However, the main tests are on third eye control. This includes activation, deactivation, threat response and elimination. At the bottom of the page, there are notes given by a personnel. Requests for all third eye tests to be bypassed. These requests have all been denied. The personnel has responded to these denied requests, reading as follows, “Libitina has not yet recovered from the termination of XXXXXX and is not expected to do so in the near future. Continuing to administer these tests will only accelerate the deterioration of Libitina’s health. You are choosing to avoid the measures necessary to prevent a repeat scenario, Doctor. Will you not have as much faith in your personnel as you do in your God?” Any further mentions at this current point in time are found within Doki Doki Literature Club or its secondary game, as was the website as well. For the unaware, Doki Doki Literature Club is a psychological horror visual novel masking as a dating simulator, centering around a boy joining a literature club. He has various choices on which girl to court, however it is futile in the end as Monika, aware of her status in a video game, has grown fondly jealous of the player. She sabotages and deletes her fellow clubmates to make herself an option to you throughout several acts where the game grows more glitched and disturbed. Despite this, she realizes the weight of her actions and decides to end this vicious cycle once and for all. Doki Doki Literature Club runs off of the game engine RenPy. As such, there is a folder titled ‘characters’ within the games files, and each of the four characters are within the folder. While there is genuine game data inside of these .chr files, these also contain separate, non-character files. Monika.chr is actually a .png which is actually an encrypted .txt file hidden in script. (We’ll get to that in a minute.) Sayori.chr is an .ogg file that when translated to a spectrogram and unfiltered forms a QR code to the Project Libitina website. Yuri.chr is actually a .txt file which is just an easter egg to another one of Dan Salvato’s (creator of Doki Doki Literature Club) works. Natsuki.chr is a .jpeg file that, when negated and polarized, forms an image of a woman with pure white eyes, white hair, and what appears to be a brown robe on. None of these are particularly important at this current point in time except for Monika.chr. Monika.chr decrypted contains text relating to Project Libitina, it goes as follows, “Can you hear me? ...Who are you? I can't.. I can't see you. But I know you're there. Yeah... you can definitely hear me. You've been watching for a while now, right? I guess I should... introduce myself, or something. Um... my name is... actually, that's stupid. You obviously already know my name. Sorry. Anyway... I'm guessing if you were able to put a stop to this, you would have done it by now. I mean, I know you're not, like... evil or anything... because you've already helped me so much. I should really thank you for that. For everything you've done. You're really like a friend to me. So... thank you. So much. I think... more than anything else... I really don't want it all be for nothing ... Everyone else is dead. Maybe you already know that. I'm sure you do, actually. But... it doesn't have to be that way, right? Well... there's a lot of stuff I don't understand. I don't know if it's even possible for me to understand it. But I know that this isn't my only story. I can see that now. Really clearly. And I think everyone else has had the same kind of experience. Some kind of deja vu. It's the Third Eye, right? Anyway... I could be totally wrong about this. But I really think you might be able to do something. I think you might be able to go back... or however you want to put it... To go back and tell them what's going to happen. If they know ahead of time, then they should be able to avoid it. They should... if they remember their time with me in the other worlds... they should remember what I tell them. Yeah. I really think this might be possible. But it's up to you. I'm sorry for always being... you know... ... Nevermind. I know that's wrong. This is my story. It's time to be a fucking hero. Both of us. 2018.” This can be inferred as an audio transcription of Monika. It has her speech patterns (but is clearly not originally written down due to the invasive amount of pauses in the form of ellipses), its her character file, and she's the only one of the four girls who would really have anything to apologize for. It appears Monika may have some sort of role to play in Project Libitina, or perhaps the entire cast based off of her telling the reader to go back and tell a mystical them, who is probably the rest of the club. Monika is very tied to Project Libitina as a whole. In Monika’s conversation topics during act 3, there's a few only accessible via datamining the game and looking through the code. One goes as follows; “The realization must have taken me an entire year. A year since our escape, our freedom from between the stained walls of that unholy establishment. What does it mean to escape, if the escape fails to unchain the bonds that shackle us in the first place? What purpose could this empty world possibly hold for us, a handful of damaged goods? With freedom, we sought purpose - and what we found was only realization. Realization of the sad pointlessness of such an endeavor. Realization that freeing our bodies has no meaning, when our imprisonment reaches as deep as the core of our souls. Realization that we can not pursue new purpose without absolving those from which we ran away. Realization that the farther we run, the more forcefully our wretched bonds yank us back toward their point of origin; the deeper our shackles dig into our callous flesh.“ This one is less explicitly related to Project Libitina, however the reference to escape and “that unholy establishment” solidifies an inference that this is from one of the victims of the experimentation camp. We’ll get further into that later, but for now let us introduce the rest of our cast.
Doki Doki Literature Club’s second act has many easter eggs. A more familiar one is the special poems in between days. While all poems have some sort of lore relevance (and are genuinely just good poems), only one is particularly required for our subject at hand today. It is a black-out poem forming the phrase, “nothing is real?” Each poem is saved as a .png inside of the game's files, and when this particular poem’s contrast or brightness is altered, the blacked out text is revealed. The text goes as follows; “Irregular heartbeat. Heart palpitations. Arrhythmia. I search and search, eyes scanning everything I can find on their symptoms. What is this? Shortness of breath? Chest pain? Dizziness? No. This is all wrong. Elyssa’s symptoms are never this simple. I’ve seen it twice now. The screams of pain. Sickeningly pale skin. Vomiting blood. There is no other explanation, other than that Renier’s information was a complete and utter lie. This can’t all be a coincidence. It’s not possible. I don’t know how much of this Renier is behind. But I do know this: There is something horribly wrong with this family. And I accepted my invitation to become part of it. I can hear Elyssa’s screams through the walls now. I listen helplessly. Renier said that he would be with her shortly. Is he in her room now? Why is she screaming even louder than before?” This reveals two important names to us, Renier and Elyssa. While the connection between these two and projectlibitina.com is never explicitly stated, it can be inferred due to the concept of human experimentation being atypical inside of the concept of Doki Doki Literature Club. It can be inferred that Renier is a doctor at the camp in Project Libitina, and possibly as well the doctor mentioned within the log of projectlibitina.com and Elyssa is the x-ed out name, her termination contributing to Libitina’s crumbling health. While Elyssa and Libitina’s relationship is never clarified, they are implied to be close due to this. DDLC+ noticeably also has a different black-out poem to base DDLC, with a different lengths and sentence structure. Due to DDLC+ being run on Unity instead of RenPy, I and many others have been having quite some trouble extracting the file from the game and brightening it properly. (Just taking a screenshot applies compression and causes the image’s opacity to become flat, rendering any secrets completely null.) Despite this failure, DDLC+ gives plenty of other leads in relation to Project Libitina.
Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! (acronymized as DDLC+ and will be referred to as such throughout the rest of this essay) is a refurbish of Doki Doki Literature Club, alongside other new content as well. One aspect of this new content is Metaverse Enterprises. They are discovered once you attempt to exit Doki Doki Literature Club, and it is revealed that this version of DDLC is a simulation within a virtual machine. This is referred to as VM1. You are greeted with a UI with many buttons, DDLC (utilized to view VM1), side stories, files, mail, pictures, music, settings, and exit. The important ones here are side stories and mail. As you continue to play through DDLC, you will unlock bonus side stories in a different, alternate universe of Doki Doki Literature Club. This is a control group of VM1, we will get to that in a minute. As you unlock the new content (alongside old content as well), you will garner data collection. These will provide you with emails from employees of Metaverse Enterprises, a data collection and storage company studying the limitations of the human mind through parallels of a digital interface. Monika, or otherwise known as the Monitor Kernel Access, is the variable in their studies. She is referred to as the Monitor Kernel Access due to her being the camera for her reality, the monitor of Metaverse Enterprises if you will. In Doki Doki Literature Club, she has elevated permissions and is aware of being in a video game, this is inherently intentional to Metaverse Enterprises study. It was to see how the mind and body would corrupt in a position of irreversible power. The aforementioned control group, the side stories, are an alternate split timeline where Monika has less permissions and is not aware of her fictional reality. There are a few other, more minute, changes as well, interestingly enough one including Yuri and the types of books she reads.
In base DDLC, Yuri is reading the Portrait of Markov, a psychological horror novel about an experimentation camp. Notably, the description of the book changes from act 1 to act 2.The act 1 description goes as follows: “Basically, it's about this girl in high school who moves in with her long-list younger sister... But as soon as she does so, her life gets really strange. She gets targeted by these people who escaped from a human experiment prison... And while her life is in danger, she needs to desperately choose who to trust. No matter what she does, she ends up destroying most of her relationships and her life starts to fall apart.“ Meanwhile, the act 2 description goes as follows: “Basically, it's about this religious camp that was turned into a human experiment prison, and the people trapped there have this trait that turns them into killing machines that lust for blood. But the facility gets even worse, and they start selectively breeding people by cutting off their limbs and affixing them to-”.. Fascinating how it gets more violent, isn’t it? It’s pretty clear that Portrait of Markov is about or in some way related to Project Libitina. Notably, a markov chain is a term of probability theory where a sequence of possible events can be theorized upon based on one single event. Sound familiar? In the side stories, she is reading Duskbell by Annabelle DuPont, the first book inside of an Everlast saga. Her interest in horror, which was previously a recurring quip in DDLC, is absent or offscreen in the side stories. It is peculiar that this is one of the changes made when DDLC sheds its psychological horror element. Project Libitina, in all of its obscureness, is set within an experimentation camp. This much is obvious with information given by the Test VM. The Test VM is unlocked after you achieve 100% data collection, when there are no other secrets left to find in the game, just this last one. See, the email states that they are searching for access to a mythical VM2, and this just so happens to be Project Libitina. In this email they also plan on preparing a new monitor, Monitor Adjacent Runtime-Level-Access. (Maria, perhaps?) They have managed a precursory viewing into the data, however it is primarily encrypted data jargon. The Test VM has around 55 different strings, all pertaining to Project Libitina and giving further insight into just what is happening in that camp. (Well, almost all of them. One line is a reference to a poorly translated cutscene from Zero Wing that became a widespread internet meme.) Any of these strings are chosen at random when viewing the Test VM. While most of the sentences can be pieced together into a coherent wordform, abrupt endings and sudden conversation switches are expected. What we have now is not finished, is not complete, and is not the full story. A lightly cherry-picked version of the strings for size restraints goes as follows: “ -indicates only 80% or less of nutrients and medical supplements are needed to keep the body alive, compared to the non-amputated control. -material resistant to the Third Eye penetration. Electromagnetic. are speculated to improve Third Eye potency by puberty. -during birth, or the full trimester? The effects- -who don’t have a Third Eye struggle to understand what current science cannot tell them. I am disregarding- -name implies death, but of what? Only the material death. Our mission to become free of the material self- - is of the Nexus extends beyond any comprehension of the material world. The only prison is our material world. The gate- -They speak to me. They instructed me to- -emotional impulse over rationality. By the- -of which disassociation is a symptom. Conditioning- -all have functional reproductive systems, then we could produce new, potent children with incredible efficiency, and sudden death would be a less- -tests focusing on each of these emotional responses to determine which- -gradual changes to the Scripture class curriculum to incorporate- By age five, children testing above the threshold will be transferred to Wing A, while all- Male and infertile children can still be trained for specialized- -list of which rooms will need doors and windows renovated to accommodate the projected increase in nutrition? During child development- -but my Third Eye shows me two of them. I can’t make sense of- -will ascend and bring salvation to all. May the Third Eye- -two Guardian Angels, condemned to blindness, who seek guiding light in their eternal prison. -should seek purpose. Purpose ignites a will to live, a will to suffer for- -beyond the eyes of the public. Decades of favorable reputation- -The key to opening a powerful channel lies in eroding the tether between- -have died so that those most worthy will be able to ascend. -voltage is appropriate for immobilization without risking permanent damage. -absolute genius and has made incredible contributions to Project Libitina, despite having no Third- -have given him the title ‘Guardian’ to reflect- Emotions are the dials and switches that override ration thought and can be fine-tuned to exert a great deal of control upon- At nine months each, a total of thirty-six would reach peak efficiency, with about one week per- -has become an increasingly scientific endeavor thanks to- -may actually produce tiny, but detectable, physical distortions in the area surrounding them. We might consider- -adulthood to receive professional training in [a] number of specialized professions we will need to staff, such as additional nurses and reproductive- Eye is open and measure any notable difference in response to danger, pain, food, and sexual stimulus. Opening the Third Eye creates a deep-brain channel which causes sentient characteristics such as consciousness and free thought to- -Love for us, the collective, triumphs over love for the individual. So a degree of sacrifice- -is far stronger during collective sessions, which makes me believe the Nexus will have incredible- Is the increased potency from proximity to others a temporary effect, or does it have a lasting impact on the strength of their Third Eye? -children are generally obedient, but with the introduction of more unpleasant activities we should consider sourcing our medication. If they are also unable to supply -can only assume that even obstacles or failures are all a part of the great plan, even if beyond my comprehension. -an Angel in mortal skin. She will walk the path to Ascension, and we will follow. The observable changes in physical appearance, however small, already prove this to be more than the usual spiritual nonsense -like dogs, genetically molded by humans and unconditionally loyal in exchange for food and shelter. -distanced from the religion which the Academy was one known to practice. Religion requires faith; this is undeniable truth. -insisted on upgrading the computer systems, going on about backups and protecting data. Nobody touches my personal “data”.”
The experimentation camp that Project Libitina takes place in appears to be religious, within a personalized variant of the Catholic dominion specifically. Due to the word choices such as “curriculum” and “academy”, it appears that the victims of this camp are raised and educated by the camp personnel with no contact to the outside world. (This can also be inferred due to Libitina being so young.) The experimentation camp itself may be set inside of a catholic school (also due to the word choice from before) or inside of a hospital (due to the level of clearance they have to perform medically invasive procedures with the equipment at the ready), however this is purely a guess. This data breach gives us further understanding on just what the camp does to its victims. Alongside the testing done to the Third Eye, they also utilize their status as their executives to perform fantasy eugenics, using the strong for reproduction purposes and the weak and infertile for fodder purposes. They have strong beliefs within the Nexus, an Angel, and the Third Eye within their dominion. Notably, a nexus event is an event in a timeline that was not supposed to happen. It is not clear what the Nexus is, but it is notably affected by the Third Eye, more prominent in group settings. Their blinded guardian angels will give salvation to the camp and the entire world supposedly, leading them to their ascension beyond the barriers of the material world. This can give enough insight for us to confidently say that the experimentation camp that Project Libitina is set within is a cult. A cult that performs eugenics and unadulterated shock therapy on its young victims and is furthering the world towards a future not too unlike the rapture. And they believe, for whatever reason, Libitina will bring them towards their ascension. That she, or possibly Elyssa, bears the name of death and that may not be such a bad thing after all, since she will free them from the material plane. I suppose we just have to wait and see, don’t we?
Project Libitina at its core is unfinished. I have done my best with what information we have, yet it still is nowhere near the full story. I imagine it is in development, but there is no true way for me to know without Team Salvato stating anything. I digress, Project Libitina is a deeply fascinating project entangled inside of the seedy underbelly of Doki Doki Literature Club nonetheless. Here's to hoping we get the full version before its 10th anniversary.
Works Cited:
Doki Doki Literature Club!, v.1.4, psychological tragedy dating simulator visual novel, Team Salvato, 2017
Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!, v.1.3, psychological tragedy dating simulator visual novel and a slice of life story, Team Salvato, 2021
“i love imgur”, Neocities, Jan 31st. 2023, looseleafnotebook.neocities.org. October 5th. 2023
Salvato, Dan [dansalvato]. Twitter, https://twitter.com/dansalvato
“DDLC+ TEST VM lines”, Pastebin, July 2nd. 2021, https://pastebin.com/2extH5QA, October 19th. 2023