Emotional Stakes: A Review of Vampire Therapist
In this review, Pyroclastic_Snow delves into Vampire Therapist, a visual novel that sounds like a fever dream but plays like a thoughtful, well-crafted exploration of emotional growth—fangs and all.
Developed by Little Bat Games, this unique title follows Sam Walls, a vampire cowboy-turned-therapist, as he helps his fellow immortals navigate their centuries-old trauma using real-world cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. It’s strange, sincere, and surprisingly effective.
One thing about games is you really don’t have an end to the creative wellspring there is available. There are ideas you think would work but don’t, and then the most wild idea that sounds insane coming out of your mouth but is absolutely amazing in practice. So, you can imagine my surprise when the visual novel about a vampire cowboy therapist is one of the really good ideas, it sounds like when I try to explain the plot of Rocky Horror Picture Show to someone who hasn’t ever seen it and then they look at me funny (granted, I’m used to funny looks, I tend to get a lot of those).
This visual novel style game follows Sam Walls, a cowboy turned vampire who, after a time doing the typical vampire things (killing and feasting on innocents and being labelled as a horrible killer for it), left his vampire “gang” and , after finding a group of mortals who treated him with immense kindness, walked through nature for 90 years and discovered that the way vampires think is pretty universal as far as the problems they have.
Sam started to recognize what later gets classified as “cognitive distortions” and decided he wanted to better the vampires around him with this knowledge and sought out help from Andromachos, a 3,000-year-old Mediterranean vampire who Sam thought might know more. Andromachos invited Sam to his German nightclub where humans willingly give their blood to vampires (with consent) and the vampires can get comfortable without worry (as long as they behave) and had Sam set up as a proper therapist for vampires, giving him proper clients from all over.
A Victorian matriarch of the Renaissance who feels like her “unlife” is meaningless because modern art has no meaning to her.
A scientist working on synthetic blood so vampires don’t have to feed off the living, addicted to a drug of his own creation, feeling like his advances up to this point are meaningless because of it.
A Victorian stage actor terrified of going back onstage because he doesn’t know if a modern mortal crowd will appreciate his acting.
Sam is tasked with helping them all. The game makers (Little Bat Games) created this game using actual therapy techniques provided by actual therapists (so don’t feel bad if you feel like you need therapy while playing, I know I need therapy, and this game made that need a little worse). And don’t worry about making a mistake, Andy (Andromachos) can stop time and give you a hint so that you pick the right distortion to focus on, but things will start to get a bit hairy the more cognitive distortions you learn!
This game is phenomenal! I’m already a HUGE fan of visual novels, but this really takes the cake for me. You can get this game for $14.99 on Steam, but don’t forget that there’s DLC for those who wanna give vampire couple’s therapy a go!
I personally also love all the little vampire puns that are sprinkled throughout, but I’ve always been a fan of good jokes. Absolutely 10 bats out of 10, please give this game a go if you haven’t already and give some love to the creators, they put so much effort in and it’s absolutely paying off!
Get the game from STEAM:
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