"Vampire Therapist" - A Review

A Brilliant Premise Suffocated by Smug Leftism

Vampire Therapist is a visual novel that serves as a fantastic example of how even incredible ideas can be brutally destroyed by the injection of vapid, tribalistic, politically partisan snarkery masquerading as intelligent commentary. I'm sad to have to give such a critical review of this game, because giving vampires therapy is a brilliant plot premise, and the use of real Cognitive Therapy concepts enables game-ifying this premise in a very intuitive manner. The game has a great art style and soundtrack and is also quite humorous. For about the first 3 hours, the game weaves a fascinating story and introduces you to many characters who are deeply intriguing and have many layers to them. At the very least, the game's writer (Cyrus Nemati) is sufficiently skilled in making you want to play beyond Steam's maximum-playtime-to-be-eligible-for-a-refund!

But about a third of the way through the game, you can start to see the political subtext developing, and eventually that subtext becomes noxious text. I wouldn't say the game becomes "woke" exactly (that's a different set of cringeworthy political attitudes), but it absolutely begins to manifest an extremely smug Continental-European Social-Democratic Anti-Americanism that frankly makes me want to roll my eyes. Now, since this game was funded (at least in part) by a public arts bureaucracy from Berlin, this isn't really surprising. However to see that attitude being spouted by vampires, one of whom is meant to be three thousand years old, is grating. Vampires are meant to be above and beyond the human condition and the petty squabbles of human politics and society. The last thing a vampire should sound like is a European university campus Young Socialists club!

Vampire Therapist is a character-driven game and, consequently, the annoying commentary is mostly spouted by or centers around one of three characters. The first is Sam Walls, the player character. The second is Meddy, whom is one of Sam's clients. The third is Andromachos, whom is Sam's mentor in the world of therapy.

SAM
The main character of the game is Sam Walls, a gunslinger from the Wild West who had no formal education but, after walking in the woods for about fifty years, stumbled upon the realization that many of his own problems were caused or exacerbated by unproductive thought patterns, and then set out to help other vampires with their issues. Sam is used by the game as a symbol of "America"/"American-ness," and whilst a character can be a cowboy without this being the case, every single other character in the game repeatedly remarks upon his nationality in insulting ways that allude to puritanical sexual repression, a lack of 'high' culture, and a fetish for firearms. The fact that every single character, whether positively or negatively portrayed, voices these exact same opinions makes it pretty clear that these opinions are really those of the game's writer. And just in case the writer's opinions on gun ownership aren't obvious enough, the game has a scene where Sam pulls his gun on a client (due to the client threatening Sam with violence) and a different character chides him for it. No, the "gun thing" can't possibly have origins in the American Revolution and Bill of Rights, it’s just a weird kink that's likely byproduct of all that puritanical sexual repression! Not to mention, Sam is white, but putting a white face on America's gun violence issue conveniently obfuscates the huge amount of gun violence committed by inner-city gangs dominated by ethnic minorities.

It is not surprising when America's relative religiosity is also targeted (despite Sam himself apparently being non-religious). The game, however, alludes to the subject by having one character raise the issue of Jesus of Nazareth's opinions about anal sex. It is true that Jesus himself stated nothing at all about the subject in the gospels, but the gospels are not the only part of the Bible nor the sole source of Christian doctrine. It should also be pointed out that anal sex and homosexuality are not the same thing, but again this game isn't interested in making an intelligent critique of homophobic religious fundamentalism, so such distinctions aren't made. Not to mention, for a European to bash America over religiously-induced opposition to both anal sex and homosexuality is rather silly given that the Roman Catholic Church (which, unlike most American Protestant churches, prohibits anal sex even between married opposite-sex couples) is a European institution, and Europe's governments have recently been indiscriminately welcoming a certain migrant demographic with alarmingly high levels of both religious fundamentalism and homophobia.

An important aspect of characterization is a character's speech. The words a character uses should be plausibly consistent with that character's background. Sam may indeed have an extremely stereotypical "cowboy" accent (which, again, is often attacked by other characters) as well as use some of the slang associated with the Wild West (or at least the Hollywood movie version thereof), but one particularly frustrating scene occurs where Sam brings up the phrases "free market capitalism" and "liberal democracy" in order to reassure one of his clients that the world is a better place than how it was over 1000 years ago. The obvious issue here is that a cowboy without a formal education who has been spending at least 50 years roaming in the woods probably isn't going to be using such phrases. However, a further issue develops when Sam's client dismisses the idea that liberal democracy and free market capitalism have improved the world; given the fact that the game positions Sam as a symbol of America and the fact that liberal democracy and free market capitalism are pillars of the American Civil Religion, this incident appears to be an obvious case of a European snarkily insulting liberal democracy and free market capitalism, presumably from a position that sees the "European Social Model" as an obviously superior alternative.

But such a position has two core issues. Firstly, it is essentially beyond dispute among economists that there is no substitute for the market mechanism and that markets are necessary for efficiently allocating the means of production. Frankly, it requires mind-boggling ignorance of history to miss the fact that, whilst no nation has ever implemented perfectly consistent classical liberalism, the more liberal nations are consistently better off and have higher standards of living even for their poorest citizens. Free market capitalism and liberal democracy have, to the extent they have been practiced, greatly improved the world, at least for humans (vampires may not have benefitted so much, sure). Secondly, the European Social Model and the American Social Model are not nearly as different as the game suggests. Both societies embrace regulated market economies, and the differences between the American and European models are generally ones of degree rather than principle. Despite what Bernie Sanders, or the more hysterical wing of the American conservative movement, like to say, European societies are market economies. Sure, the European model has more generous social services and a more interventionist bureaucracy, but there are also ways in which the European model is more free-market than the American one (for instance, European nations generally have lower business taxes) and European social services have often embraced the kind of market-based reforms that the American left habitually casts as right-wing conspiracies (for example, Sweden has school vouchers, and France allows patients to use their public health insurance at private clinics). It should also be pointed out that much of Europe's vaunted social services are paid for with consumption taxes that unavoidably have a larger impact on the poor than the rich (as the poor spend a larger fraction of their wealth on consumption), so in other words much of these services merely represent churn rather than actual redistribution. Ultimately, the snarky pseudo-commentary this game makes on the subject is driven by both policy ignorance and what Nietzsche memorably termed the Narcissism of Small Differences.

To be fair, whilst Sam is often used to assist in lecturing the audience about the terrors of "America," he is a fully developed character with an extensive backstory. However, even his backstory is used by the game's author to engage in political point-scoring. Perhaps the most cringe-inducing example of this is when Sam reveals that his former gang still exists but has now transformed itself into a health insurance company! Now of course there are many reasonable criticisms of the American health care system to be made (even many libertarians such as myself would make several criticisms of it), but once again this game isn't interested in making intelligent critique but rather in preaching to the choir. Health economics is an exceptionally complicated field with many difficult tradeoffs (most prominently the so-called Healthcare Trilemma, where everyone wants healthcare to be affordable and fast and high-quality, but no healthcare system yet implemented has ever been able to deliver more than two of these things at once), and we certainly can't pretend that state-ran healthcare systems don't have problems (see the UK's perpetually-beleaguered NHS) or that market incentives cannot improve healthcare (see for example how the French and German healthcare systems allow their public patients to choose private clinics). But nuance and complexity are absent from Vampire Therapist.

MEDDY
Meddy is a nearly-two-thousand-year-old vampire who comes to therapy due to issues with a fanbase she has cultivated online. She works as both a popular video game streamer as well as an erotic content producer for the gameworld's equivalent of OnlyFans. This is a very interesting character concept, but the game's writer uses her as a sock-puppet to make starkly similar complaints about social media to those one regularly hears from technocratic bureaucrats in Brussels. There is, of course, legitimate criticism to be made of many social media sites, but Meddy's story quite literally casts "the algorithm" as some omniscient eldritch horror that aims to destroy human individuality, rather than a simple piece of software engineering that shows users content similar to content they've previously engaged with. The implicit message seems quite obvious: surely if an ancient vampire is threatened by "the algorithm" then it must be sufficiently dangerous to normal humans to justify EU-level regulation of social media!

The game's writer also uses Meddy to share his completely unsolicited opinions about certain other videogames, in particular the Call of Duty series of games. I am not a fan of Call of Duty either, but I know reductive-patronizing-snark-posturing-as-serious-critique when I see it, and referring to the series as "Call of Nationalism" and describing it as being "all about men who are proud to be angry" is a clear case. Again, the problem is not necessarily that Nationalism (or Call of Duty) is being critiqued from a certain perspective, but that the critique is lacking in any real substance. Nationalism has a long history, both on the left and the right, and it isn't synonymous with either jingoism or racism, but Vampire Therapist wants to rant, not discuss.

ANDROMACHOS
Andromachos is a three-thousand-year-old vampire from ancient Greece, and it is he who is used to deliver the game's most cringe-inducing economic illiteracy. The game does not suggest Andromachos has any formal economics training at all, and whilst a Greek being economically ignorant is not particularly surprising (ha ha, predictable joke), the concept that a Greek can live for three thousand years and not notice that even the typical working-class citizen of market-based societies has an immensely superior quality of life to the typical citizen of ancient Athens strains credulity.

One of the first moments in which this game makes its agenda clear is when Andromachos makes an anti-capitalist rant about hedge fund managers being a "cabal of evil cultists." This rant is particularly galling considering it happens immediately after Andromachos speaks about the dangers of presuming one is always right, of never questioning one's assumptions, of imputing motives to people with no evidence of said motives, and of making broad generalizations about groups of people! Physician, heal thyself!

The financial services sector is also lambasted a second time when, during a session where Andromachos is giving Sam some therapy, post-COVID inflation is blamed on an investment banker who is also a powerful ancient vampire. But once again this is a clear case of economic illiteracy. Post-COVID inflation was caused by the large amounts of economic stimulus spending that basically all Western governments (including that of the United States) engaged in during the COVID pandemic. Blaming bankers for the foreseeable consequences of government policy is right out of the anti-capitalist playbook, but I guess we cannot be surprised that a game partially funded by a government is going to try and deflect blame from it.

It comes as no surprise that, despite being a three-thousand-year-old Greek who lives in Germany, Andromachos is highly opinionated about American politics (just like his writer, coincidentally I'm sure). At one point, when discussing how vampires are typically bisexual (as after living long enough, one apparently just stops caring), he says that there is "a group of vampires out there in Washington who claim to be straight, but they're not fooling anyone." This is obviously intended to be a swipe at the US Republican Party, and whilst such a swipe was certainly justified back in the days of George W Bush (where the party's rampant homophobia was regularly punctuated with gay sex scandals), that era ended fifteen years ago. Not only is same-sex marriage now the law of the land (thanks, most critically, to the work of Republican-appointed jurist Anthony Kennedy), but the first President to enter office openly accepting of same-sex marriage was a Republican by the name of Donald Trump (a man who has openly been supportive of same-sex marriage since the late 80s). Trump ran an LGBT-inclusive campaign, voiced support for the LGBT community at the Republican National Convention, appointed a regularly pro-LGBT jurist to the Supreme Court (Neil Gorsuch), and also was the first American President to appoint an openly gay person to his cabinet (Ric Grenell). He and Grenell launched a campaign to encourage more nations around the world to decriminalize homosexual sex acts. Most recently, Trump got the national Republican Party to remove anti-gay language from its platform. Whilst several nuanced, informed critiques of the present-day Republican Party can be made, Vampire Therapist isn't making them.

And just if you haven't yet gotten the message about the political views of the writer, he decides to have Andromachos make nasty remarks about Ayn Rand. I am a Rand fan, so I obviously have my own biases on the subject, but there honestly is quite a tragic aspect to a game about Cognitive Therapy attacking Ayn Rand in such an ignorant and performative fashion. Rand was present at the birth of the Cognitive Revolution in psychology and strongly embraced the basic principle of Cognitivism: that emotions are deeply impacted by one's thoughts and beliefs. As Jennifer Burns described in Goddess of the Market, Rand's student Nathaniel Branden had a great influence on Rand's thinking about psychology and introduced Rand to Cognitivist ideas. This influence can also be seen in Rand's epistemological theory, which was deeply impacted by one of the most cited papers in psychology: George A Miller's "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." In other words, there is much discussion to be had of links between Rand and Cognitivism, not excluding critical discussion thereof (for example, whether Randians may be more vulnerable to certain cognitive biases relative to people of other ideologies).

Unsurprisingly, none of this is alluded to. Instead, Andromachos describes Ayn Rand as a "nihilistic vampire" (and he means vampire literally) and suggests she believed that life is futile, existence is misery, principles and integrity are all lies, and that kindness is never rewarded and often punished by the universe. Frankly, to describe Rand in such a manner is evidence of never having read a single essay she wrote. The mindset Andromachos accuses her of having is one she referred to as "the malevolent universe premise" and outright rejected. And she most certainly didn't believe that kindness is never rewarded or that the universe punishes people for benevolent acts - the very first essay in The Virtue of Selfishness makes it clear her position is that benevolent action typically advances your own rational interests due to the great values-to-oneself that other people can represent (such as knowledge, trade and companionship). Randian philosopher David Kelley expands on this further in his book Unrugged Individualism: The Selfish Basis of Benevolence. I can only conclude, from Andromachos' remarks, that the game's writer has a less-than-surface-level familiarity with Rand's actual beliefs.

CONCLUSION
Let me make it clear - the problem with Vampire Therapist is not that it contains some leftist political themes, or that it criticizes Ayn Rand. Batman: The Telltale Series contained leftist themes, and the original BioShock criticized aspects of Randian thought. But they both did so in an intelligent and nuanced manner. By contrast, nuance and depth (and, apparently, basic familiarity with the target of critique) are completely absent here. This game doesn't really engage in political discussion - it spits insults at the writer's targets. This style of "commentary" is really about throwing red meat towards an audience whom is presumed to agree with it already, and is presumed to respond with a smug chuckle.

Look, we get it. The people who made this game are likely people with humanities degrees from Continental universities, whom are convinced (primarily due to a mixture of policy ignorance and the Narcissism of Small Differences) that European Social Democracies are more humane and compassionate societies than the United States, and that Americans are essentially all mindless uneducated yokels (but of course every European is somehow automatically an heir to the great artists of the Rennaissance, statesmen of the Roman Republic and philosophers of Athens), and that there is something deeply barbaric about those (gasp) Americans with their guns, cowboys, individualism, religion, nationalism, liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. And as stupid, smug and self-aggrandizing as their attitudes are, they're allowed to have their own attitudes. But the reality is that putting these attitudes in the mouths of three-thousand-year-old vampires makes no sense in context, and it is clear the choice of a cowboy protagonist was made to slake a particular thirst of Europeans, or at least Europe's intelligentsia - a thirst for contempt towards "America" as an agglomeration deserving of not mere resentment, but ressentiment in the truest Nietzschean sense of the term.

That said, should we truly be surprised? This game was developed by a Berlin-based team called Little Bat Games, using public money from the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenberg. We are dealing with a product of the same intelligentsia that committed The Treason of the Intellectuals. We are dealing with the output of a segment of society that has a vested interest in opposing liberal democracy. Vampire Therapist is nominally about real-world Cognitive Therapy techniques being used to help vampires, but this brilliant premise (with all its educational value) is squandered because the game's writer is too interested in yapping about his own highly-uninformed-yet-highly-fashionable politics through the mouths of his characters.