Review: Vampire Therapist – What happens when What We Do In The Shadows decides to get much-needed therapy?

I’m a big fan of well-written visual novels that offer humor and a good story, which is why I’ve already done a preview of this game months ago before it was released. Vampire Therapist asks the question, “Who all needs therapy?” and answers it with a “Everyone, especially those who have lived through hundreds of years of trauma.”

Vampire Therapist is, honestly, not much more than a normal, linear visual novel. But, in its simplicity, it tells a funny story about vampires who, at their core, want to better themselves. 

If you’re a fan of the FX show, What We Do In The Shadows, you’re likely familiar with the dark comedy this game has to offer. It’s crude, sexy, vulgar, and hilarious. 

Vampire Therapist story and gameplay

The protagonist is named Sam, a vampire cowboy who’s been dead for over 200 years, dealing with his own trauma and horrible past. Through the years, he figured out that vampires and humans both deal with a lot and sometimes just need therapy. He seeks out Andromachos, an ancient vampire who owns a German nightclub, who teaches him new ways to consider therapy for their kind.

Andromachos, or Andy for short, has invited Sam to the nightclub, where he offers ongoing training, clients, all the (consensual) blood he can drink, and therapy for himself. During his stay, Sam meets a full cast of characters from across history, with varying degrees of issues.

For instance, Isabella d’Este is an example of someone so absorbed in being right for the past several hundred years that she can’t understand how anyone could do anything less than perfect. She’s also based on a real-life Italian Renaissance figure, much in a similar way that Assassin’s Creed does the same type of historical revision. Except, in Vampire Therapist, it’s with vampires and comedy.

The main gameplay of Vampire Therapist is all about letting your clients talk and catching them in “cognitive distortions”. Using real-world therapy, these are types of statements that people use to distort and perceive reality exaggeratedly. For instance, a “Should Statement” is any statement that says you “should” do something that isn’t necessarily your personal responsibility.

Throughout the game, you learn more cognitive distortions to add to your toolkit. Andy says that all distortions are potentially used by anyone and this is where a little customization comes into play. At a certain point early on, the game sets a client’s primary distortion and you get to pick four more from the list of options to utilize as well. 

I’m sure there’s some replayability factor to try other distortions and see what entertaining or funny dialogue comes with it. It’s a bit of an illusion to let you think you’re in control of every session in such a linear game. But, that’d be a “Control Fallacy” cognitive distortion to think that, wouldn’t it?

Art and Audio

Vampire Therapist is wonderfully done as an art form, honestly. As with most visual novels, the characters don’t actually animate but are static images that change with emotions and gestures. Honestly, these are very well done.

All in all, there aren’t a ton of backdrops or changes of scenery throughout the game and it can get a tad stale seeing the same lounge/office, downstairs bar, and kink room over and over, back and forth. But, there’s nothing negative to say about how the art itself was handled. I just wish there were more places to go.

But, with the limited animation, the voice acting shines through. Cyrus Nemati, creator of the game, is also a prolific voice actor. Not only does he voice a large majority of characters in Vampire Therapist, but you’ve also likely heard him in indie games like Hades (Ares/Dionysus/Theseus) and Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (Boris Petrovic). 

In addition to Nemati, the game is full of other well-known voice actors, such as Matthew Mercer, who voices a couple of characters in the game. This includes the very horny German goth, Reinhard. He’s not a therapy client but a patron at the nightclub who really wants to have Sam bite his neck, suck his blood, and have sex with him afterward. You know, normal German nightclub stuff. Probably.

The music, according to Nemati, is varied as it’s from the nightclub. However, I encountered a bug for the majority of my playthrough where the music never changed to another track. So, as good as it was, I didn’t want 10 hours of the same tune. After letting Nemati know, he believes that shouldn’t be a problem after the more recent patch.

Cozy and Cons

If you’re looking for a cozy game, you can’t get much more relaxing than a visual novel. Vampire Therapist is incredibly cozy, complete with quirky characters and funny interactions. 

I do want to touch on the minigames or Vampire Therapist in this section though, as they offered a slightly less-than-cozy experience. Due to a bug early on, the meditation was borked for me. In order to actually complete it, I had to use both a mouse/keyboard combo and a controller to do anything. This was true for my entire playthrough. 

I informed Nemati, who said this was a new one he hadn’t come across, but it’s possible it could still happen. It’s possible that it was solved in the recent-ish patch, but my playthrough was started prior to it and I didn’t want to lose that much progress.

At the end of one of the days, I encountered another bug that crashed the entire game during a minigame that involved biting the necks of consenting nightclub patrons in the kink room. Unfortunately, I had not manually saved in quite a while, hours worth of gameplay.

After speaking with Nemati, he explained that the game autosaves after each day, and showed me where to find those. I had only lost about an hour of gameplay, luckily. If you tap the TAB button, you can also skip lengthy dialogue options, which I used to get back where I was quicker. Hit it again to put the dialogue back to normal speed. I never encountered that bug again after the recent patch, so it may have been solved.

All in all, those situations may have been fixed at this point. But, I’m not able to drop another 13 hours into the game to find out. So, just be cautious.

One thing that I don’t believe is a bug is that some cognitive distortions are trickier to parse than others, depending on the options you’ve given yourself. If you’re trying to go for a perfect run (or at least keep a streak going), you may run into some tricky ones that will throw you off and not make as much sense as a different distortion you have prepped in your toolkit.

Aside from those issues and the aforementioned music bug I encountered, the game was great.

Final Verdict

Vampire Therapist is, by far, among my favorite games I’ve played this year. While any linear visual novel isn’t exactly engaging gameplay in any purview, this one kept me coming back to learn more about the amazingly written, compelling characters throughout.

Not only that, but the voice acting was top-notch. Nemati did something really right with the casting and writing as a whole.

Based on the open-ended finale of the game, a Vampire Therapist 2 is likely in the works. If I had a say in how a sequel should be, I’d say to have more tutorials for the minigames and functions of the menus themselves, more varied minigame types, and more locales. Otherwise, don’t change a thing.

All in all, I highly recommend Vampire Therapist. I’ve left out a lot of the details in this review to keep from offering too many spoilers. But, it’s well worth the price for a great time.

You can pick up Vampire Therapist right now for $14.99 on Steam. While you’re here, you should check out the awesome interview I did with Cyrus Nemati, creator and primary voice actor of Vampire Therapist, earlier this year.