Considering how entrenched they are in popular culture and how long they've been around, you would not expect a story about vampires to throw anything new into the mix – certainly not a tale about a disillusioned bloodsucker who goes soul-searching for 90 years and decides to get therapy – and yet, Vampire Therapist exists.
A fun bit of IF from Little Bat Games (a 2-year-old fledgling dev from Berlin, Germany), Vampire Therapist does a great job of humanizing the undead and making them feel like proper, three-dimensional beings – with concerns, fears and regrets – rather than mere bogeymen who hide in dark alleys and exists solely to provide jump scares on cue.
The story follows Sam Walls, a vampire and former gunslinger, murderer and all-around scumbag, who decides to abandon his bad habits and strike out in search of a more meaningful undeath. During his extensive wanderlust, he formulates a few (seemingly accurate) insights into vampiric behavior and comes to the conclusion that, were they properly addressed, a path to a less miserable existence could be opened. To put his theories to the test, he searches out Andromachos – a three-millenia-old vampire elder – who is said to be able to help vampires find a better way to exist. Andromachos takes Sam under his wing (pun intended) and, together, they try to help vampire clients resolve their issues through therapy.
To start on a strong note, Vampire Therapist is quite pretty — with artful, hand-drawn illustrations and solid character design. The narrative is very well-written and its cast is as complex, believable and likable as any you'd find in a capable novel or a well-regarded film. On Little Bat's site, it is noted that Cyrus Nemati – its founding member – was a voice actor and it shows, as the VO in the game is some of the best I've heard recently, with actors that understand nuance and tone, can do accurate accents and are a pleasure to listen to. Music and sound effects round out the presentation with a showing that is competent without being extraordinary.
Interactive Fiction is rarely known for the depth of its gameplay and, on that front, Vampire Therapist sticks close to genre norms (which, honestly, is a little disappointing). I would have loved to see a dialogue-rich experience with branching paths that would let you succeed (or fail) in your job as a therapist through the conversational gambits you picked and advice you chose to dispense...
Instead, the game is divided into rigid, linear sections, each of which introduces a set amount of conversational quirks (called "Cognitive Distortions"), which – when identified properly – allow Sam to acquaint his patient with a bad habit of theirs (which, in turn, propels the plot forward). In later sections, once he is aware of all distortions and the root of a client's troubles, Sam can pick which distrotions he will focus on during a session, but the addition – while welcome – does little to make the gameplay interesting.
On top of identifying Cognitive Distortions, two fairly basic mini-games round out the experience, but neither is interesting or challenging and both could have been left out without any noticeable effect on the game. That Little Bat made any effort to vary the experience is commendable (moreso for their first release), but the result is the weakest aspect of the game, so I'm not sure it did them any favors.
Where negatives are concerned, I encountered only a few in my playthrough, the first being that Vampire Therapist was made using Unity. As befits that "venerable" platform, load times are overlong, animations stutter (or, sometimes, cut out altogether) and – on one occasion – I loaded my save only to have the game overlay the main menu on top of it, forcing me to reload once again... No big deal, as bugs go, but certainly dulling the sheen of an otherwise decent production.
That aside, the only other shortcomings were a few of the spoken VO lines not aligning with the written text and some formatting symbols creeping into the subtitles.
On the whole, though, given its original idea, gripping story, fun characters and clever dialogue, Vampire Therapist is a fun tale to experience. Just don't expect the gameplay to dazzle you with complexity: on that front, the game leaves IF conventions firmly in place and offers nothing new.