Are you passionate about health gamification and eager to discover new ways to design meaningful, effective experiences? Then you’ll want to tune in to this Series 3 Episode 11 of Health Points, featuring Cyrus Nemati, founder, creative director, and the multi-talented mind behind the award-winning game, Vampire Therapist.
Meet Cyrus Nemati: From Policy to Playful Purpose
Cyrus’s journey is anything but ordinary. From policy communications in Washington, D.C., to voice acting in California, and finally to founding Little Bat Games in Berlin, his path is a testament to the creative possibilities that emerge when diverse experiences collide. You may recognize his voice from Supergiant Games’ Hades or his writing from major IPs like Jurassic World and Mr. Robot. But it’s his latest project, Vampire Therapist, that’s making waves in the world of serious games and health gamification.
Vampire Therapist: Comedy, Cognitive Distortions, and Real Change
What happens when you blend the timeless allure of vampires with the science of cognitive behavioral therapy? Vampire Therapist is a narrative comedy game where you play as a cowboy vampire-turned-therapist, helping other immortals confront their cognitive distortions. The gameplay centers on identifying these distortions, like control fallacies or disqualifying the positive, through engaging dialogue and mini-games, including a mindfulness meditation simulation.
But this isn’t just edutainment. As Cyrus shares, players are reporting genuine self-reflection and personal growth, even those with prior therapy experience. The game’s design encourages pattern recognition and internalization of therapeutic concepts, all while keeping the experience accessible, humorous, and non-confrontational.
Design Insights: Accessibility, Repetition, and Player-First Thinking
Cyrus offers a masterclass in designing for impact. He explains how minimizing player stress and maximizing accessibility were central to Vampire Therapist’s success. Instead of overwhelming players with choices, the game guides them gently, providing hints and support through a mentor character. The focus is on learning through repetition and reflection, not punishment or failure.
For those working on small teams or solo projects, Cyrus’s advice is invaluable: start with what you can do yourself, keep the scope manageable, and always design with the player’s experience in mind. His rapid production timeline - just a year and a half - shows what’s possible with clear vision and resourceful execution.
The Future of Health Gamification: Personalization, AI, and Bespoke Experiences
Looking ahead, Cyrus predicts a “Wild West” era for health gamification, driven by AI and personalization. While he’s wary of AI therapists, he sees potential (and risk) in using technology to tailor experiences. His hope? That bespoke, thoughtfully crafted games like Vampire Therapist will continue to thrive, supported by public funding and a commitment to player well-being.
Golden Nuggets for Health & Gamification Professionals
- Therapeutic Distance: Games can provide a safe, third-person perspective for players to engage with challenging concepts, making learning less confrontational and more effective.
- Collaboration with Experts: Working with therapists and historians enriched the game’s content and authenticity. This is an approach worth emulating in your own projects.
- Iterative Design: Don’t be afraid to adjust your design for accessibility and engagement. Sometimes, less is more.
- Long-Tail Success: Awards and recognition may come from taking creative risks and focusing on genuine impact, not just immediate commercial returns.
Why Listen?
This episode is packed with practical wisdom, candid reflections, and inspiration for anyone designing health gamification projects. Whether you’re a developer, designer, therapist, or researcher, you’ll walk away with actionable insights and a renewed excitement for the power of games to drive real change.
Ready to Level Up Your Health Gamification Practice?
Tune in to hear Cyrus’s full story, learn from his design process, and discover how Vampire Therapist is helping players—and professionals—rethink what’s possible at the intersection of health, humor, and play.
You can listen to this episode below:
Episode Transcript:
Ben
Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Health Points, where we talk about anything and everything gamification and health. I'm Ben, and I have with me my co-host Pete.
Pete
Hi everyone.
Ben
Today we have with us Cyrus Nimati, founder and creative director of Little Bat Games. Cyrus wrote, directed and programmed Vampire Therapist, a fully voiced narrative comedy game about finding purpose when death isn't a concern. A BAFTA nominated game and winner of multiple other awards this year already, Pete found out about the game as it is a Games for Change finalist and so we're extremely happy to have Cyrus here with us today.
Cyrus
Thank you for inviting me on the show. I'm excited to be here talking about gamification and all the good stuff that's sure to come.
Ben
Brilliant. Let's get going. You're going to tell us more about your background and how you ended up in game making.
Cyrus
Sure. It was a circuitous route for me, as I'm sure it is for a lot of people in games. So I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. So of course, I ended up working in Washington on policy communications. But I had always wanted to be a voice actor, primarily, since I was a kid. And given the political environment, around 2015, it seemed the right time to do something unusual. So I quit my job. I moved out to California to become a voice actor. And I had some decent success as a voice actor for video games. But my writing background turned out to be useful as well. I ended up doing a lot of writing work on a number of the games that I voiced, which is generally a lot more of a stable job than voice acting, though that isn't saying much. So in 2018, I took a full-time writing job in Berlin, and I started my own studio, Little Bat Games, in 2022. So it's a very wild mix of a background, but I think it prepared me to do the work that I'm now doing.
Ben
So what have you, what kind of games have you worked on previously, and were they all Berlin-based? Is that where you started games, or was it in California as well?
Cyrus
No, it was more in California. Actually, I got my start going on Kickstarter and seeing what games looked ambitious but didn't have a lot of money. And I offered my services to them because that's the kind of project that I wanted to get involved with. So that means that I've worked on a lot of smaller independent titles. Most people probably know me for my voice work in Supergiant Games Hades, where I played a number of Greek gods and mighty mortals. I've also gotten to work on some bigger IPs like Jurassic World, Mr. Robot, and probably some other things that I've forgotten. I have little IP tie-ins. My last job was in Berlin, my full-time job. It was at a mobile game studio where I was working on their narrative for their billion dollar selling game.
Ben
So what led to the Vampire Therapist then?
Cyrus
Well, yeah, it was really just a simple kitchen conversation about how useless vampires seem to be in media. What does a vampire typically do? They seduce, they kill, they live in castles. But what are they even doing in their castles? It was just a joke conversation about what they actually do because it doesn't amount to much. There's a scene in the first Twilight movie, which I have seen, where hottie vampire Edward Cullen is playing the piano, and we're supposed to be very impressed because he's had 200 years to practice. To a trained ear, it's actually not very good. But that got me thinking, why does he have to be good at the piano? And that got me thinking more about what pressures a vampire would put on themselves when the excuse of I don't have enough time is gone. That was really the starting point because even in our mortal lives, we put intense pressures on ourselves and we judge ourselves based on what other people have done or based on societal expectations or our parental expectations. For A vampire, these things can certainly calcify. So they were a great foil for these sorts of questions.
Ben
Yeah, I've never had that reflection or thought watching any vampire movie. But yeah, if you have limitless time, shouldn't you be brilliant at everything?
Cyrus
Yeah. I thought, why not go to Mars? Why not go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench? Why not write the great novel? But clearly they haven't done any of those things because we would know about them by now.
Ben
I suppose also Mariana Trench would make sense because no sunlight down there either. So yeah. A lot of sense, right. So it'd be great to know more about the game experience. Talk us through the journey as a user or a player.
Cyrus
Sure, so most of the gameplay of Vampire Therapist is a discussion between the player, you're playing as a cowboy vampire, a transcendentalist cowboy vampire from the 19th century, who's gone on his own mental health journey, and he is helping new clients in this above a golf club in Leipzig. It all makes sense, believe me. So really what you're doing is having conversations. And at certain points in the dialogue, the client will say something that is unprovable or untrue, basically exhibiting distorted thinking. These distortions are well-documented and classified as cognitive distortions in the real world. So When these distortions appear, the player gets to pick what classified cognitive distortion the character is exhibiting. That's really the bulk of the gameplay. So there's a lot of listening involved and a lot of reflecting, just like in real therapy. We have a couple of mini games as well, and you have your own story that you're progressing through as you're trying to discover what you want to do with your immortality. One mini game that we have is where you're just biting sexy necks and finding non-lethal veins. It's really just a palate cleanser again. And then we have another, which is a simulation of mindfulness meditation. I like that one as somebody who's not great at mindfulness meditation, and that game is as simple as holding or releasing a button to either breathe in or breathe out, and your thoughts appear, and all you have to do as a player is just hover over the individual thoughts to clear them. It's not about judging your thoughts, it's just acknowledging them. So I thought it was a nice little manifestation of what mindfulness meditation is, but most of the gameplay really is talking and a lot of jokes.
Ben
I think the phrase finding sexy necks and non-fatal veins is probably a phrase we've definitely never had and I doubt we'll ever have again.
Cyrus
Yeah, Well, I mean, it is something inherent. There's a reason I chose vampires. You know, the sexiness of a vampire is comedy in and of itself. So making fun of that sexiness is a core part of the game's theme.
Ben
And what impact and feedback have you had from players so far?
Cyrus
Yeah, this is interesting. It isn't quite what I expected. I assume that players would start to understand the concept of cognitive distortions, but reading the reviews has been incredibly gratifying because our players are actually recognizing real change in themselves. even when they've had therapy already. And I think that this is the real benefit of gamification and why we're talking today. I'm not a stranger to therapy myself. I had heard all of the cognitive distortion terms myself, but did I internalize them? Not necessarily. Like they would come up again and again because I was not internalizing. This pattern recognition that's required in vampire therapist's gameplay I think is a grounding exercise that helps one recognize these terms in others and in themselves. And that's the feedback that we're getting, where players are internalizing these cognitive distortion concepts and are able to do some self-healing by reflecting when they are exhibiting a control fallacy or they are disqualifying the positive, these things that are natural in any human's life. So it's been incredible to see this kind of response.
Pete
How many times in the game do people need need to spot these and then learn and internalize them? What have you aimed for and what is supposed to be achieved?
Cyrus
So we have 13 cognitive distortions that can be learned by the player. Once they get access to more than five of them, they will choose what distortions they're going to go into a client session with because each client has five sessions. So you get to see client growth, you get to see where their problem areas are and pick the distortions that are appropriate to the client. So in conversation, it depends on which cognitive distortions the player has chosen, but every single one of them is represented in conversation because one of the things that we wanted to get across is that we are all exhibiting all of the cognitive distortions all the time, meaning that we needed to have them present in every conversation. So I'd say like, you know, in total, there's probably a couple of 100 in the game that you can discover. You won't find them all the first time. You will have to pick different distortions. But yeah, in order to make them all present, we needed to write quite a lot of them.
Ben
And I completely understand that as going through therapy is an incredibly subjective process and relatively emotionally intense and trying to step back and go, there is a particular disorder or cognitive dysfunction and I need to make notes whenever I go to therapy because I know I'll come out not remembering a thing. But being able to go into that situation almost as an outsider, as an onlooker, as a third person within the game, to engage with the therapeutic terminology, the different diagnosis of disorders or dysfunctions that exist and think through them rather than being in the moment of therapy, I can completely understand and see the value for the player within that.
Cyrus
Yeah, I think that degree of separation is exactly it. Like it's less confrontational to look at someone else and make these same observations than it is for yourself, especially when the characters are very silly and over the top as we tried to do in our game.
Ben
So how did you approach the design of the game? Let's go back. So concept was vampires, something interesting there about their role in society and culture and the mythology behind them having infinite lives, but also that they may need support because they may have issues in their lives. So how did it go from that to game design?
Cyrus
Yeah, the game design was really down to minimizing choice, actually. We wanted to make as much an accessible game as possible. So when I originally devised the game, I had the idea that the player would be able to recognize any cognitive distortion at any time during a client's speech. But this would actually create some problems for me, both as a writer and a designer, but more important is that it would be stressful for the player. That's what I wanted to avoid, because that makes it less helpful as a teaching tool. So... In designing the game, I took great pains to ensure that the game was accessible and that any time a player gets a distortion wrong, or incorrect rather, they're given a hint as what the right answer might be. You have a mentor in the game who teaches you all of the distortions, and when you're in client sessions, he'll kind of interrupt telepathically through his vampire magic and tell you more of the direction that you should be looking in. So yeah, It was never a consideration that the player would be able to lose and have a vampire go to meet the sunrise or stake themselves in the heart. So when it comes to the gamification of everything, my experience has taught me really that engaging repetition and minimal choices were the right way to go.
Ben
Within the interaction then, as the player, do you have certain options of phrases that you can communicate between you and the vampire, or is it multiple choice? How does the actual interaction work?
Cyrus
Yeah, so when you get into gameplay, you have at the bottom of your screen a maximum of five cognitive distortions. You pick them before going into a session generally, and again, like whatever you pick is your own choice, although it can be based on what distortions the the characters are exhibiting. There's a few more choices in the game which are more for narrative, and they're mostly to provide extra information. Like we have one character who is a 400-year-old doctor who hates being a vampire and is trying to come up with a synthetic blood, and he likes to see everything very logically. So we actually go into the neuroscience a bit as well. So there are chances in the game where you have the opportunity to learn more about either a historical and and historical event or about things like neuroscience. And you can ask more questions or you can skip ahead because that was one of the other design elements I had is that I don't want players to get bored. So if they want to skip things that they don't find as engaging, I wanted to give them that option. We also had some other choices which are mostly for silliness. The thing that I found out in watching people play is that everybody seems to want to get all the questions right. I like to encourage getting things wrong because it's funny or interesting. I'll have to tackle that in my next game because I don't think I quite nailed that. But yeah, really when you go into a session, it's at the bottom of the screen, you have the distortions you picked, and then the game will pause when that particular distortion pops up among one of those five, and then you get to pick which one it is.
Ben
And what's the average game play time? How long does someone... And how long is a mini game versus the therapist session?
Cyrus
Yeah, mini games are very quick. The neck biting mini game is as simple as you click once and you see whether or not you hit the vein or not and you try again or you can even skip it. The meditation mini game is a little bit longer, maybe a minute. The full game itself clocks in about 10 1/2 to 11 hours for most people.
Ben
That's a reasonable commitment. Yeah. I was expecting maybe what kind of average gameplay chunks of time is it? 10 minute half an hour increments to make up that 10 to 11 hours.
Cyrus
What I have discovered is that most players... will go through the client sessions for each of the four clients, plus the introductory one for each chapter that teaches you new cognitive distortions. That amounts to about 2 1/2 hours of gameplay. Like our gameplay times tend to be quite long for players. And the reason the game is as long as it is, because I wanted to show that growth in the characters. That was actually like the minimum length I could make it. Originally, I had planned on four client sessions per client, then it just moved too quickly. So I think having four showing each client at a particular crisis point and then having basically an epilogue for each character really made the whole thing flow a lot better.
Ben
And you've worked with a few people on this. What kind of tricks and tips have you learned or any kind of wisdoms in Golden Nuggets?
Cyrus
Well, so One of the best parts of working on games like this is I get to work with experts. So I worked with a consulting therapist and I had other therapists that I talked to. One of the interesting bits from developing this game from a therapeutic perspective is that my understanding of cognitive distortions is more I don't know, I guess logical than I guess one would expect in actual therapy. Like for instance, one of the things that I learned is that a cognitive distortion, clearly a distorted thought, isn't classified as a cognitive distortion if it is beneficial to the person who's thinking it. So it's not something that we call out as negative if it's beneficial to the client. Yeah, in terms of other people that I work with and the wisdom that I get generally, It's really having a player-first thought process, where it's not about what I want. It's about their experience and how smooth it can possibly be. So the UI work is probably the biggest element in a game like this and where we spent the most time. I think it will probably always be this way for every game we make.
Ben
And what do you think the future of vampire therapist or your future gamification or what do you think the future of health gamification or well-being gamification is more generally?
Cyrus
Oh man, yeah, unfortunately, I hate to say it, but personalization is probably going to be the watchword and it is going to be driven by AI. I imagine you've already had conversations this year about people using AI as therapists, which is a monumentally stupid idea. But it is likely that this tech will be used to personalize gamification as well for good and absolutely for ill. It's going to be very difficult to tell the difference. So we're entering a real Wild West period. I'm hoping that bespoke experiences are still going to be the way to go, but both bespoke experiences need support. Lucky for me, I live in Germany where there is public funding for projects like this. I don't think I would have been able to do it otherwise. I know that AI is going to be creating a lot of these experiences in the future, unfortunately.
Pete
I think we're getting the impression from what you're saying that you've personally built, designed, written, a huge amount of this game, whereas I think mostly we have teams of people working together to create games because they're all big. Have you got any tips on where to put your focus, your attention if you're trying to design a game with as few people because you don't have the budget?
Cyrus
Yeah, I think always going with, I start with when I'm making a game is what I'm capable of doing entirely on my own. These are the things that I know I can guarantee to a certain extent. The more people that are involved, it does slow down the process, certainly, and it does make it more expensive. So starting from a point of what is the maximum you can do, because somebody has to be driving the project. If you are capable of taking it to a pretty far degree, that I think invites other people to come along for the ride with a certain degree of confidence and the ability to bring in their own elements to, the game, to the story, to the art, to everything. So again, like how simple can we make it? How possible is it for, you know, one person to do a tremendous amount of work on it? I mean, maybe it's not the healthiest thing for a developer to do from my perspective, like having to learn programming was not easy. And I don't expect everybody to do that kind of thing. But there's still like, we all have tons of experience in different walks of life. So being able to figure out how to use them to best effect, I think is the best way to make sure that you're making a game that's within your reach.
Pete
That's very cool. So how long did it take to write and create?
Cyrus
Oh, man. production was a year and a half, which I'm really, I am proud of it, because I have seen in the game industry, well, collapse. Like it's been really, really bad. And a lot of collapse happens when games are too big and take too much time. you can't spend years on pre-production. So going into it and moving quickly and being able to know, this is the advice that I give to any game designer who comes to me, is know what the end looks like before you get started. You know, if you're feeling it out during production, things are going to go wrong. So having an idea in your head of what the final game looks like, I think is imperative.
Pete
So how did you end up with an expansion pack already about couples that would be.
Cyrus
Expansion pack was super, super easy for us to do. Like I didn't add any new functionality. Like the most difficult thing I added to it was, so our DLC Couples Therapy is a revolutionary story. It's 2 vampires who died in their respective revolutions, one from the French Revolution and one from the Iranian Revolution. Very prescient today and I should probably be doing a better job selling it than I have been. But Probably the biggest piece of tech that was introduced to this was having the French revolutionary smoking and having the cigarette smoke work properly. I think other than that, we could work very quickly. I actually released three pieces of free content, which give you some background into your teacher's history because he's a 3,000-year-old vampire. So I could look at different points of history that I thought might be particularly poignant for a 3,000-year-old vampire. But really, It was just a matter of writing the dialogue and getting the voiceover and art in. So it was an easy game to make DLC for.
Pete
That's really interesting. How many people have played it? And also, why do you think it's won so many awards already and it's been nominated for a BAFTA?
Cyrus
Yeah, we have. Not the biggest player base. It tends to be, I think it's like 80% not men. I think for obvious reasons, like vampire plus therapy. I actually planned on doing an ad campaign that I was too lazy to do where I would go on the street and ask men what they would rather do than play a therapy game. But never mind that. Our player base is around 40,000 This is just on PC. We haven't released on other systems yet, although that is coming soon. That can be an exclusive here because I haven't really announced it yet. But the reason I think that it has done so well on the awards circuit is that it does look and feel very different. Going back to the AI thing, we can act as game designers like AI ourselves. When we make games that are geared toward an algorithm and based on what will get us on the front page of a platform, that's really, you know, a lot of what it is these days, is like how do you make sure the store puts you on the shelf with the eye line? But it means that our design process can be overly directed that way. I took a risk in knowing that this was not a game that was going to make its money on day one. And most games are designed to make their money back on day one. Honestly, it was terrifying. I released the game on the first day. It was not great. And then for three months, it was less than not great. And I was going into panic mode that I have to apply for jobs again. But The word of mouth really picked up and the reviews did tremendous work for us because they came out right out of the gate and even when we had kind of a buggy product when we released. But Eurogamer, for instance, did a large piece on how it was helping them actually reflect themselves. So seeing this genuine genuine result from playing the game, I think helped in the long tail. And actually, our sales have been going up every time one happens. So this is very unusual in games, and I'm hoping to keep betting on this long tail.
Pete
That's great. Do you know, just something I'm nosy about. You obviously write narrative. You're a voice actor. How many characters in the game do you voice?
Cyrus
So let's see. OK, one. two, three, 4, 5, 6. It was 6 characters in the game. And if you count the DLC, then it's 9. Just because I, this is my studio is right next to me. It's made out of PVC pipe and heavy blankets. I can just hop in and do it. And with this particular game, The writing process was so intensive and it needed so much editing to make sure that I was getting the distortions correct, that I was just re-recording lines constantly. So it was just a lot easier to just go in the booth and do it myself. The next game will be a little bit different, so it will have a bigger cast. But yeah, it's always easier when you can handle something yourself.
Pete
Well, obviously, any hints as to what you're doing for the next game?
Cyrus
Yeah, we're doing something, let me see. It's, I call it a sociological murder mystery where the victim is all of us. And it's really talking about like, you know, where wealth inequality comes from. Yeah, it's a pretty intensive historical study that is reflective of modern times. But it uses a lot of the same sorts of devices as Vampire Therapist does to get players to actually engage with these questions and reflect on them themselves.
Pete
That sounds really interesting. Yeah.
Cyrus
I'm really excited about it. I have a whole library that I've made for it behind me and I'm getting my new bookshelf is arriving next week so I can have more room for these research books.
Pete
Now that's the fun bit, isn't it?
Cyrus
It really is.
Pete
What games have inspired you in your game design? And are there any you'd recommend we take a look at in future episodes?
Cyrus
Yeah, so from a comedic perspective and from an audience perspective, I grew up on the old LucasArts adventure games, things like Day of the Tentacle that have a very cartoony style and are very, very engaging and always fun first. Those are the things that have inspired me from a presentation perspective. In terms of things like Vampire Therapist, there's not a lot out there really. One of the reasons I was excited to make this game was that there is an educational event, because there are very few games like that. We used to call it edutainment. And I guess it exists for kids in some fashion, although it tends to be like, you know, very service-oriented, which, I don't know, is a way of making money these days, but I don't know that it makes the best experience. That being said, there are games that are less focused on gamification, but are also valuable for introspection. I really like the Spanish studio, Deconstruct Team. They made an excellent game some years ago, a sci-fi game called the Red Strings Club, that asked some really tough and soulful questions. And more recently, they've developed some more introspective games that don't take a long time to finish, which I think is also really nice as a grown-up who can't spend forever on a game. with the exception, and I'll always gush about it, is this new Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 game, which I consider a sociological masterpiece in how it recreates life during feudalism's decline. And we're still grappling with a lot of this stuff sociologically. So I think it's as current as ever. And it's a beautiful game, and it's a fun game. Like I said, I feel lucky to be in the time where something like this could come out. and a lot of historical accuracy. I work not only with therapists, but with historians on Vampire Therapist. One of our clients, Isabelle Bella d'Este, was a real character from Renaissance Italy, and I got to read 20,000 of her letters because someone had translated them into English. And I got to work with a professor on it. And it's such an incredible experience to be able to do something like this. So, you know, games that have that kind of rigor are really exciting for me.
Ben
Cyrus, it's been fantastic having you on the show today. To go really deep through your enthusiasm and passion and just to hear about your journey from political policy to voice acting game studios and setting up your own studio, Little Bat Games. An in your game vampire therapist exploring and learning through a therapeutic process, providing the player with the ability to take more of a third-person perspective on therapy. and the opportunities to learn about cognitive distortions with humor and side games included, which can aid in real-life cognitive and emotional reflections and processing. And a key learning for you was knowing what the final game looks like before beginning the production, to work within your resources and limits, because this can lead to creating a multi-award-winning game. Thank you so much.
Cyrus
Thank you so much for having me on.
Pete
Cyrus, it's been brilliant. I've learned a lot and I can't wait to actually play the game now that I've heard about it in such detail.
Cyrus
Well, I'll send you some keys, make it easy for you.