Your first introduction to therapy comes from Sam’s very cute cowboy interpretations of cognitive distortions, he calls them High Noon Mind, Hot Branding and Saloon Thinking. Each of these distortions relates to what Sam calls “the funny ways we vampires think” and can be used to pick out when another vampire may be limiting their options through these distortions. I really liked Sam’s funny little names for the distortions and was a bit upset when he was quickly taught the actual cognitive behavioural therapy terms instead. Sam also learns several more distortions from Andromachos, a 3000-year-old vampire who is teaching Sam how to offer help to other vampires, and providing Sam with some therapy himself.

Their dialogue is always great, Sam is very sweet but actually quite intelligent and quick to pick up on when he himself is using unhelpful language. Andromachos feels ancient, just in the way he speaks, but still comes off as very friendly and likes joking around. These are the two characters you see together the most, so it’s good their relationship feels so natural.

When conducting a therapy session, Sam keeps an ear out for any of these distortions and if he catches one the dialogue pauses until you figure out which distortion it is. There isn’t any penalty for getting it wrong though, Andromachos speaks to you telepathically and asks you to try again. What’s interesting is that you are only able to bring light to the distortions that you selected to focus on that session, meaning that sometimes a line of dialogue containing a distortion will pass on by without you addressing it. This is because Andromachos says the last thing you want to be doing is pointing out every single distortion a person uses, because it will start to feel like you are needling them and actually be more unhelpful. While the cognitive distortions are easy to grasp, it does make the dialogue a little clunky when Sam takes the time to always use the correct term for each distortion. It’s a bit too much therapy-speak, but it’s separated by enough funny dialogue that I didn’t find it too grating.

The minigames that pop up throughout Vampire Therapist do not hold up to levels of quality throughout the rest of the game. There are two minigames, one where Sam is having a drink from a tasty human neck, and another where he practices breathing techniques. Neither of these is tutorialised very well, at first I thought the breathing mini-game had bugged out and closed the game because I just couldn’t get it to work, but it turns out I just had not been taught a key part of the game. The biting minigame has problems too, it’s hard to tell where to bite, and though it’s easy to brute-force, I always found myself getting frustrated with it. Both the minigames also don’t match the art style of the rest of the game and seem out of place.

The only other issues I encountered were very small. Sometimes the spoken dialogue wouldn’t completely match with the subtitling, but never in a way that was confusing or inaccurate, just different similes and occasional missing words. There’s also a cute curtain-closing animation that’s used as a scene change, and more than half the time it would glitch and not work properly. This did not affect the game itself, but it was very obvious and a bit annoying.