Doki Doki Ragnarok review for PC

Platform: PC
Publisher: BrutalHack
Developer: BrutalHack
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: M

Doki Doki Ragnarok is a game where… how do I explain this without sounding like I’ve lost my mind? Doki Doki Ragnarok is a game where you play as a Viking who is looking for… love, I think? You are a tall and fearsome Viking who has set sail to raid and pillage the villages of various European countries. Except that in this scenario, the villages are sentient and the interaction is more like a quasi-dating game where you have to figure out what each village likes the most. It’s… not the easiest thing to explain.

Doki Doki Ragnarok is a visual novel style game, where you interact exclusively through dialogue options and navigate your way through the rough and complicated battlefield of Viking-village love unions. The quality of writing is consistently hilarious throughout the game, where I was consistently finding myself smiling and giggling at every other line of dialogue. The villages are full-on sentient beings that you have to do a back and forth sort of puzzling out how to get them to like you most.

Realistically, DDR is mostly just a satirical play on a stereotypical visual novel dating game, but instead of humans, you have to convince a pile of buildings to like you. You navigate this obstacle course through hails of puns and cheeky throw-in gags that regardless of how good you do, will most likely have you smirking as you read the dialogue to yourself. You have to do your best to read the room and decide how to win that village over.

Is the village telling you about how it’s always wished to see a Viking in the flesh, in all of their Viking glory? Time to rip back a whole horn of mead and burp right back at them. Are they being too pushy, telling you what to do? Guess we’re raiding England instead. You don?t get to tell a viking what to do. There may only be the same four dialogue options at most encounters, but somehow these 4 options feel unique to every village you encounter.

Doki Doki Ragnarok is a game that’s incredibly difficult to describe without sounding like you’re three days out from the last time you slept, but I promise you that you won’t regret playing it. It’s short (about 5 hours for me to play through it) with limited replayability outside of testing the differences between passing or failing in a “dating” scenario, but it’s just such a good, goofy time. It’s only $12.99 on release, so if you enjoy goofy humor, snatch it up! Need just a little extra convincing? They even offer a free demo.

PUBLISHER provided us with a BrutalHack PC code for review purposes.

Grade: B