Metahorror Therapy Session (2025)

I've never been the first to leave a rating and write a review for a game on here, this is kind of exciting, haha.

Metahorror Therapy Session is a relatively short visual novel where you play as a therapist attempting to help your new patient, Noel, open up about himself. As the title of the game implies, there's more to this therapy session than meets the eye. The game is a bit rough around the edges but overall more polished than I would have expected from an early dev effort. Noel is very expressive and the camera is surprisingly dynamic for the genre. The writing also did a solid job of drawing me in. Noel is an interesting character to spend time getting to know, which keeps things moving along even when they slow down around the midpoint.

While I think the premise is neat and the initial game loop fun, I feel a bit let down by the rest of the experience. Progression quickly turns into a game of choosing all the options just to see if any do anything and it isn't immediately clear what options contribute to moving the story forward when I succeed in doing so. There's supposedly like an affection system or something that measures the strength of your relationship with Noel, but I failed to see what role it played in the experience at large. Maybe it opens up another ending? I got one of maybe two I think.

Fans of Doki Doki Literature Club will feel at home with how this one plays, though it puts a spin on the concepts of that game that I think makes this worth checking out. The writing is decent, even if the gameplay fell a bit flat for me. The love the author has for their character shows in the sheer quantity of dialogue and I think that's cute.