Vampire Therapist [Review]
Help vampires work on their mental health, exactly like the title implies.
Vampire Therapist. Credit: Little Bat Games
Vampire Therapist is the third game I’ve played in the last couple months with a focus on mental health and therapy. That statement isn’t meant as a slight; I admire that we’re seeing more games that explore delicate, important issues such as mental health, especially when they exhibit the emotional depth, thoughtfulness, and quality of Little Bat Games’ Vampire Therapist.
Little Bat Games’ Vampire Therapist is a narrative game, a visual novel built around Sam, a vampire and former cowboy, taking on his first patients as a therapist, under the wing of much older vampire Andromachos. Sam spent his human life and beginning of his vampire unlife as a remorseless killer, but has a reawakening after hitting an all-time low. He decides he wants to help other vampires become better versions of themselves, so Sam travels to Leipzig, where 3,000 year old Andromachos has offered to train him in the dark arts of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Sam will spend the next six months seeing several clients, as well as being a patient himself, as a therapist in Andromachos’ office in the upper floor of his Goth nightclub.
Vampire Therapist. Credit: Little Bat Games
Gameplay is all in conversation. As patients speak to you, you must recognize and choose the correct cognitive distortion present in their statements as you work to help them recognize and handle their neuroses. These cognitive distortions are patterns of illogical thought that contribute to a patient’s negative thinking. An example could be “disqualifying the positive,” where someone might dwell on the one negative piece of criticism when most feedback was positive. Over the course of the game, usually in Sam’s therapy sessions, Andromachos will teach you about additional cognitive distortions, and eventually you must select a group of key distortions ahead of each client’s session to use as your focus in their treatment.
There is no failure in Vampire Therapist. If you identify a distortion incorrectly, Andromachos will appear to gently push you toward the right choice and you’ll suffer no consequences. Likewise, any dialogue choices you have won’t result in negative outcomes; you’ll simply try another option instead and then progress. It’s very low stakes, but I feel that it’s appropriate for a game that handles the idea of therapy seriously that you can’t do something to cause a bad result with a patient.
Vampire Therapist. Credit: Little Bat Games
The way the game handles the subject matter with care even while being over the top is a testament to the quality of the game’s writing and voice performances, its two greatest strengths. Every character has depth, exhibiting real emotion even while essentially being a caricature—sometimes of a real historical figure. For example, your narcissistic patient is Edmund Kean who was a Shakespearean actor, the patient dealing with control issues is Isabella d'Este, a notable Renaissance patron of the arts. Your patient with an addiction and multiple personalities is a scientist that may as well be Dr. Jekyll. Sam, the protagonist, is stuck in his cowboy past as far as his fashion and dialogue go. At first I found him irritating, but he quickly became endearing once his emotional journey felt real.
While Vampire Therapist is small, featuring only a handful of environments and characters, the art is highly polished. The characters are richly rendered in 2D; they’re not animated, but feature several poses to communicate emotion. Nearly every situation in the game features people talking while either seated or standing, so not much more is necessary and what’s here looks great.
Vampire Therapist. Credit: Little Bat Games
The game’s controller implementation seems to be incomplete. I played on my Steam Deck connected to a TV with a standalone controller and wasn’t able to interact correctly with some UI elements without modifying my controller profile to include joystick mouse simulation. It’s only mildly irritating, but it’s is something that I hope the developers patch to fix.
I came away from Vampire Therapist feeling like I had learned something. Its polished writing and dark comedy create a compelling experience out of the game’s character-driven narrative that made learning about CBT even more interesting.
Vampire Therapist is available now for PC and Mac on Steam.
Overall Score: 7/10
Played on: Steam Deck
