Syntherapy
Crowned Daemon Studios · 2020 · Visual Novel, Choices Matter, Interactive Fiction, Emotional, Psychological
PC
Mostly Positive74% · 27 📈 Making a comeback 82%
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About Syntherapy
Syntherapy is a visual novel adventure game that thrusts the player into the heart of a challenging psychotherapy case where their choices, both in conversations and types of treatment chosen, will have powerful consequences.
Syntherapy sees you play as Dr. Melissa Park, a psychotherapist called to Petrichor University by research student Tara Northrop. Tara has created an experimental therapy AI that is showing signs for concern.
Willow is so advanced that its creator needs to ensure its mental well-being. Dr. Harold Freeman, the President of the university, is worried that Willow's sentience could have wider ethical ramifications for the university, and has been fighting to have it shut down.
Syntherapy sensitively looks at the ethics surrounding advanced AI, and explores a variety of topics related to mental health. The game asks wider questions of its audience and the moral behavior of humans, as they design and construct artificially intelligent beings.
Syntherapy is not recommended for children, or those who may be affected by such subject matter.
- Challenging and thought-provoking dialogue choices.
- Complex loyalty management system that takes player choices, play style, and topics chosen into account.
- Your choices and how to choose to interact with others will directly affect how the game story progresses and ultimately, the ending.
- A variety of in-game music to select during session planning.
- Over 37 possible endings!
- Explore a variety of topics related to mental health and mental illness while uncovering the mysterious backstories of all the main characters.
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
This game is already more than 3 years old, but still has problems that people complained about right after launch and feels abandoned by the developer. Text overlapping, game crashes at random (not often, but it happens) and most importantly, Steam achievements NOT working (although in-game it shows you which you have achieved). Games can crash on occasion, but you can't advertise a game having 53 achievements without them actually working. The game itself is decent, but until the achievements problem is fixed, this is a downvote for me.2 found this helpful
Three hours in and I'm really liking it. The story and main themes are very interesting and the options presented during the course of therapy are surprisingly varied and complex. Therapist being one of my dream professions (although I currently help people in a different way in my occupation), I enjoy the moments that force me to really stop to think about the opinion or advice I'm about to give. So far, the game has been more free-flowing and fluid than I had anticipated, so it really feels like doing therapy by using one's own personal style. I very much recommend this game for any other kitchen table psychiatrists and people fascinated with the philosophical and psychological questions related to AI and it's humanity. One negative thing, though: I've unlocked achievements in the game, but they do not seem to be triggered in Steam. I understand this has been going on for a while now and the problem hasn't been fixed or patched at all. :(
I managed to do one playthrough of this game, and I think that is all I'll do. The idea is interesting, but the implementation needs major improvement. For starters if you are going to have 30+ endings, give me a way to easily save my game and/or go back and try new choices without a full restart of the game every time. Every other visual novel I've played has figured out how to do this, so there is no reason for this game not to. And I'm not going to spend an hour replaying it each time because... The other issue. The game gives no feedback on why you get the ending you get. Nothing in the flowcharts, nothing in the game, it just happens. So I have no idea what I did to cause this ending, and no idea how to get something different next time, which makes it likely I'll accidentally get a repeat ending without understanding why. Manual saves, or at least using the flow chart like Raging Loop does where I can select where on the chart to resume my game at would go a long way to fixing up that other issue, as I could then play around without taking about an hour each atttempt. But both combined to make this a not recommended for me.
Recommend
I'm really enjoying the game
i like it although it freeze and crash sometimes. also it would be good if i could unlock achievements.
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