Vampire Therapist

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game was selected by Patreon donors to be reviewed in the April 2026 Patron Poll. If you want to participate in this monthly poll, donate $5 or more to join in!)

Vampire Therapist is a Visual Novel released in 2024 on PC, with a port in 2026 to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. This game puts players in the role of cowboy vampire aspiring therapist Sam Walls, who has taken up an invitation to Germany to visit Andromachos, an elder vampire who shares Sam’s interest in tending to the mental health of vampire-kind.

As silly as that concept may seem, it’s approached with surprising maturity, even as the game’s relaxed tone assured the player that the game isn’t taking itself too rigidly seriously. Sam is something of a cowboy stereotype, and indeed many of this game’s characters are stereotypes – the Jekyll and Hyde-inspired doctor, the primadonna Shakespearean actor, the playfully flirtatious OnlyFans VTuber… but underneath their cartoonish personas, each of these characters has surprising depth and thoughtfulness. Sam, for example, may speak with a drawl and use plenty of old-timey cowboy terms, but his connection to his cowboy past hides a lot of regret and a history of trauma.

It’s also refreshing to see a vampire story where these sometimes-murderous monsters aren’t depicted as monsters, but flawed and broken people who need help. And the seemingly one-dimensional way these characters view the world gets deconstructed to reveal the misconceptions that underly that thinking. Vampire Therapist begins with a disclaimer that real-life therapists were consulted in the making of this game, and it shows, as the conversations you have with other vampires will have you at some points stopping to diagnose statements with real-life cognitive behavioral therapy concepts like disqualifying the positive, labeling, control fallacy, and “Nosferatu Thinking” (this game’s way of referring to black and white thinking).

These moments where you’re asked to look at statements and try to discern what sort of fallacy they represent feels reminiscent of the Ace Attorney series’ trials, except you’re given as many opportunities as you need here to find the correct answer. Still, it makes for an excellent mechanic to try to pick through the information you’re getting to find the key that will unlock progress.

I should note that Vampire Therapist takes an… oddly nuanced view towards vampire morality, too – the aforementioned VTuber at one point casually mentions her fans willingly letting her kill them to sate herself, seeming to gloss over the murder as okay because there was consent, even though it’s well-established by this point that vampires in this world don’t need to kill to drink blood. On the other hand, at one point Sam making a casual and well-meaning observation about the bartender’s misguided way of thinking is met with anger because she didn’t consent to being therapized by him. I think that highlighting the importance of consent is wonderful, but this seems to be taking it to extremes.

However, the main problem plaguing Vampire Therapist on Nintendo Switch is that this is probably the buggiest Visual Novel I’ve ever played. The game froze at multiple points for a short while, multiple menus or prompts pop up over each other but are still controlled simultaneously, and often when trying to select a cognitive behavioral therapy term to apply to the current conversation, pressing the A button to confirm your selection has the game thinking you’re trying to move the conversation forward instead. What’s more, while there are options in the game’s menu to change the delay in the text automatically continuing, there doesn’t appear to be any option to keep it from proceeding without your input.

There are also some woefully misguided minigames such as trying to time a button press so a moving pair of fangs lands on a blue vein, something that doesn’t add to the enjoyment of the game and seems to have little place in a game that is otherwise a thoughtful exploration of character and cognitive thought patterns.

I should also take a moment to talk about this game’s presentation, because it’s wonderful, a combination of some really lovely hand-drawn artwork with excellent character designs, and some phenomenal voice acting by veterans like Matt Mercer and Sarah Grayson, who give these already fascinating characters even more depth and personality than the exceptional writing already did. This is backed by the muffled sounds of music of the nightclub underneath the floor of the room most of the game’s therapy takes place in, which helps set the scene pretty well.

In the end, it’s this game’s excellent story and presentation that really shines through here – Vampire Therapist has some truly exceptional writing and characters that make it a must-play Visual Novel game, even though the package they find themselves in is a horribly buggy mess. Unless you don’t have patience for these sorts of flaws, I would argue that if you enjoy thoughtful stories about the way we think, Vampire Therapist is absolutely a game you should play.

tl;dr – Vampire Therapist is a Visual Novel where players take the role of a cowboy vampire aspiring therapist, and as silly as that concept sounds, this is a surprisingly thoughtful, well-written game with fantastic characters and a great story, with outstanding voice acting. It’s a shame that it’s also the buggiest Visual Novel I’ve ever played. However, if you have the patience to get through this game’s frustrating interface issues and pointless minigames, I think you’ll find the great story and characters make this an excellent entry in the genre.

Grade: B+

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