Thank you Ultimate Games for sending us a review code!

Vampire Therapist was released on Steam in 2024 and received positive reviews. Since its release, a few free DLCs and one paid DLC have been released. Two years later this title was released on consoles with all of the DLC bundled with it. Be warned that this is a VERY mature game and is not safe for playing around anyone without raising any eyebrows.

You play as Sam Walls, a simple cowboy who wants to help make a difference in his “unlife” after causing a lot of misery during his time as a mortal. Sam used to be a blood thirsty cowboy who didn’t think twice about committing crime or murder to make ends meet. Before his demise, Sam lost his nearest and dearest family members. After becoming a vampire, Sam wandered the wilderness for ninety years and met up with some transcendentalists who helped him see things from different perspectives. Sam came up with a few simple explanations for common behavioral tendencies that he encountered during his journey.

After wandering the wilderness, Sam learned how to use the internet and got in touch with a 3,000-year-old vampire therapist in Europe named Andromachos. Sam wants to help troubled vampires and wants to learn from Andromachos. There’s a dance club in Leipzig where Andromachos operates his counseling sessions. After a therapy session, Sam can go down to the lower level to talk to the bartender named Crimson and get some fresh blood from willing mortals. There’s a mini-game where you have to press a button to line up the moving fangs with the blue veins on the person’s neck.

With the guidance of Andromachos, Sam learns how to identify thirteen cognitive distortions, and each clients has one that plagues them the most. Before each session, Sam can pick other cognitive distortions that the client is likely to use during therapy. As you’re listening to the client, the game will pause and let you stop them in their tracks to identify their cognitive distortion and correct their perspectives.

Here’s the list of cognitive distortions that you’ll learn about:

Always Right – believes they must always be correct
Blaming – misassigning responsibilities of negative outcomes
Catastrophizing – jumps to the worst possible conclusion
Control Fallacy - irrational belief that one has either complete control or powerlessness over all events
Disqualifying the Positive - individual rejects, dismisses, or ignores positive experiences, achievements, or feedback
Emotional Reasoning - clients treat their subjective feelings as objective evidence of reality
Fairness Fallacy - patient believes that their efforts must result in proportionate rewards, leading to feelings of entitlement
Labeling - assigning fixed, global traits to oneself or others based on a single incident or behavior
Mind Reading - individual inaccurately assumes they know what others are thinking or feeling without sufficient evidence
Nosferatu Thinking - black and white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking
Overgeneralization - patient views a single negative event as an invariable rule
Personalization - client takes excessive responsibility for negative events
Should Statement - rigid, inflexible rules imposed on oneself, others, or the world

With the exception of Nosferatu Thinking, all of the above are legitimate cognitive distortions. Little Bat Games had the incorporated therapeutic concepts vetted by licensed therapists. Simulated therapy is an interesting concept, but this game is very mature and should not be played out in the open.

Apparently vampires in this universe are sexually fluid and are open to experimenting with mortals and immortals alike. Many of the characters were straight in their mortal life and switched sides after becoming a vampire. The Couple’s Therapy DLC has Sam treating a homosexual couple with an age gap spanning a couple of centuries. The LGBTQ+ agenda is unavoidable, even in the base game.

Vampires need blood to survive and there’s a mini-game involving biting a neck properly. Language is very vulgar and lewd. Not only is every curse word imaginable used, but anatomy comes up often and sexual organs are name dropped frequently. I don’t recommend playing this game around people within earshot.

Not surprisingly, there are references to the undead and vampires being immortal beings. Vampires can still die, and you do get to talk one out of committing suicide. Religion comes up occasionally and one of the patients calls people of faith “sheeple”. Jesus is mentioned a couple of times, as are other religions.

Outside of the awkward moral issues, Vampire Therapist is a well-made game. Outside of one line that was clearly recorded differently than the rest, the voice acting is superb in this title. The visuals are nicely drawn too.

I do have one technical complaint with the game saves. For some reason my manual game saves would only load half of the time. Thankfully the game’s checkpoint saves were pretty reliable and I didn’t lose too much game time due to this glitch.

If you’re fascinated with psychology, Vampire Therapist may sound appealing. If you don’t mind the objectionable content and LGBTQ+ stuff, you’ll have a lot of fun playing it. Morally, I can’t recommend it to anyone without them changing their opinions of me.