Syntherapy

I'm always down for a nice visual novel that deals with therapy and psychology. I enjoyed playing Eliza a few years back and so Syntherapy seemed like the next best thing to another great story. You play as Dr. Park, a psychotherapist in the not so distant future. You get an email from a woman asking for help in treating a child. Upon answering the request, you learn that it's not a child, but an AI that was developed in an university. The AI has gained sentience and has shown signs of needing therapy after reading some of the poetry Dr. Park wrote back in college. What follows is a tale of learning about the AI, finding a solution to their problems, and more. Like stated before, Syntherapy is a visual novel so there is mostly listening to some nice voice acting and occasionally making a decision to progress the plot. Making choices effects your relationship with different characters in the story which will determine your ending. There are some small mini-games peppered in there as well, but for the most part you will be listening to the story. The lo-fi tracks included in the game were nice, but short and repetitive. This could be grating to some players since they repeat a lot and you can't change the track during story segments. When you are in the planning section, you can go over emails, review your relationships with different characters in the story to see what you need to improve on in the therapy sessions, play some mini-games, etc. I found the overall story enjoyable and really liked the characters presented, for the most part. Sadly, I do have some gripes with the game. The UI is very unpolished as you'll have a lot of dialogue and tutorial boxes clashing with each other making a big mess. I hold the relationship meters to not make any sense as they would say I have high trust with a certain person, but in a story segment that same person would be yelling at me saying they do not think I'm good and very untrustworthy. There are some game breaking bugs as well. Certain parts of the game that have a fade to black are prone to crashing. I was unable to see the end of the game because after the scene was finished, I'd get a black screen and hear the game playing, but nothing would progress. I have seen numerous players complain about this and sadly the issue has yet to be fixed. Final verdict? Although the game has its problems, I still really enjoyed what I played. The story was very nice and I wish I could have seen it end. There are multiple endings so I assume other endings worked and others don't. If you're in the mood for a therapy visual novel about therapy for AI sentience, then this might scratch that itch for you. Just be wary of the bugs that come with the package. Thanks for reading!