Full disclosure that may hold more info than you think is revelant, but I am slightly obsessed with vampires. …Maybe a bit more than slightly. I’ve had a thing for them since I was 8 years old, and nothing’s going to make me stop loving them now!
I’ve also been in therapy before. Not due to my interest in vampires, though for all I know, maybe someone would consider that therapy-worthy. But while my experiences with therapy weren’t always the best, I did come away with a few coping skills and nuggets of wisdom, and on the whole I think the idea of cognitive behavioural therapy is a great one.
Combine the two and what do you get? You get Vampire Therapist, that’s what. A damn good game that’s more -tainment than edu-, but still with plenty of lessons to teach the player as they go.
Vampire Therapist
Genre(s) – indie game, visual novel
Original release date – July 18, 2024
Playable on – PC
Played on – PC
Developed by the Berlin-based Little Bat Games (what an adorable name!), Vampire Therapist is a game where you play as Sam Wells, a vampire therapist. A vampire who is a therapist to other vampires. You’ve likely heard of the game already, given that it’s been nominated for, and won, multiple awards at this point. Well-deserved, no less, as the game takes an approach to storytelling that’s both insightful and entertaining, and definitely something that I felt was a good fit for my game library.
YOU ARE DESERVING OF LOVE, ESPECIALLY FROM YOURSELF
Vampire Therapist starts out slowly, with 19th century cowboy Sam Wells showing up in Germany to learn from Andromachos, a renowned therapist. Sam has learned over time that there has to be more to vampire existence than violent debauchery, and his goal is to help other vampires find peace with themselves, to heal from their traumas and to live better lives — or unlives — than they had been before. A noble goal, but not one that he can do without assistance. While aiding others, he in turn is aided by Andromachos, who helps Sam not only learn new things that can help his clients, but also how those things can be applied to himself.
The thing about cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, is that it doesn’t seek to cure your problems. It aims to give you better tools to handle them, different ways to think about them. And for that to happen, you have to be consciously aware of how you’re looking at them to begin with. We see plenty of things through a skewed lens. We pile pressures on ourselves that we might not even notice until we start to buckle under the strain. CBT helps you understand where the mental tangle might be knotted, and gives you the tools to see how you can work to untie it.
Vampire Therapist focuses a lot on what’s called “cognitive distortions,” which are exactly what they sound like: twisted ways of thinking. For instance, you might think yourself unlovable, and so alienate yourself from others, convinced they’ll all hate you anyway. You might think that nothing you’ve ever done is worth praise. You might do what I do a lot and fall prey to “should statements,” things that turn something you want to do into something you feel obligated to do. We all do these things.
And if humans do that, how much worse do you think it might be for vampires? Creatures resistant to age and yet forced to live among the aging, people with centuries to build up negative thought patterns. People who have more time to get set in their ways, and who more often than not come from times when therapy, if it existed at all, sometimes just involved throwing you in an asylum.
Vampire Therapist is an amazing edutainment game, one that has a compelling and diverse cast of characters to learn about and help in whatever way you can. But more than that, more than just wanting to know more about them and how their stories progress, Vampire Therapist has lessons that you, the player, might also need to hear. In recognising cognitive distortions in Sam’s clients, we’re better able to recognise them in ourselves, and thus better able to untangle those twisted thought patterns that can sometimes keep us locked in places we’d rather not be. It doesn’t beat you about the head telling you to go to therapy yourself, but assumes that knowing is half the battle, and so gives you knowledge in a way that’s highly entertaining and amazingly gentle.
EVERYONE’S BISEXUAL!
Vampire Therapist has a delightfully dark sense of humour that permeates even the more serious therapy sessions. These characters are all people who lead a different sort of life from you and I (unless there are some ancient immortals reading this; leave a comment to let me know!), and so jokes about blood, sex, and death are all handled with adult charm. This might be an edutainment game, but it is emphatically not for the young. Hell, less than half an hour into the game, Sam heads into the back room of the local vampire club, known as the Kink Room, for a little biting session with a pair of German goths. Pretty blatant merging of blood, sexuality, and dark humour, and it’s just so… me. Seriously, this is the sort of humour I really enjoy in a game. Dark, with some edge, but that also knows when to ease up on the edginess without going too far.
I mean, come on, you can make Sam lie in his luxury coffin and watch reruns of The Three Stooges. How is that not funny?! The incongruities are what give Vampire Therapist an ironically human appeal. These people, for all their age and experience, are still people at their core. There’s always something about them that’s at least a little bit relatable.
Well, almost always. When it comes to Lord Luridus, maybe not so much…
But what amused me the most of how this seems to be a game where sexuality is as fluid as blood. People talk about aesthetic and sexual appeal as if they exist independently from gendered connection quite a lot. Pretty is pretty, sex is sex. It’s honestly a refreshing take, and one that fits with my own personal view of vampires. Sure, we may have our preferences, but if you’ve lived for 400 years, chances are the rigidity of those preferences might break down, giving way to pleasure just being pleasure.
Vampires in popular media are often symbolic of consequence-free transgression, so it’s not surprise to find that on display here. It makes sense, too, that consequence-free transgression could lead to the very kind of life where a little bit of therapy might help. In that, Vampire Therapist is expertly written, crafted from the ground up to show that such a life isn’t without consequence, but that it’s not all doom-and-gloom either. There’s goodness and humour and darkness to be found no matter what sort of life you lead, after all.
When I get right down to it, Vampire Therapist is more than just a game that entertained me. It helped me. Not many games can claim that. It showed me kindness and compassion, and showed me the tools I can use to help improve myself, and then handed them over to me. It’s not a game that promotes mental health by giving me a comfy cosy relaxing game to play for a few hours until I feel less stressed — though there’s benefit to that too, don’t get me wrong. It promotes mental health by peeling back the layers and showing us that to find the light, we have to do the hard work of confronting the darkness. It teaches us that we’re not going to win every battle, but trying is still important. It’s not relentlessly upbeat, but it’s full of its own kind of hope.
And fuck me if it isn’t just the game that I need sometimes!
I haven’t played through all the DLC yet. Some is free, some is paid, but all of it adds to the base game in a way that doesn’t just feel like a way to get extra money, but instead of a way of presenting more stories and giving the player more tools, more ways of recognising and handling their own distortions in a variety of situations. Legitimately, I love this game. It’s a slow-cooked meal on a chilly day, one that gives you warmth without merely making you forget that the cold exists. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s easy to overlook them in light of the game’s overall goal.
If you haven’t already done so, check Vampire Therapist out. It’s well worth your money and your time. And it might just make your life a little better too.
Quadnines 
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