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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  A game you can’t win
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A game you can’t win

That Dragon, Cancer forces you to reconcile to not always being able to defeat the bad guy

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Video games are all about journeys into the unknown. As a player, you embark upon a roller-coaster ride through various fictions, universes, realities and consequently through a wide range of human emotion. The immersive experience video games offer has attracted storytellers of late, and many of them are pushing the boundaries of games, turning them into art. That Dragon, Cancer, an indie project that has been capturing significant attention at exhibitions, is one such game. Its story explores grief, death and living with a terminal disease.

Amy and Ryan Green have just lost their son, Joel, to a form of brain cancer at the tender age of 4. They, along with a small team, developed That Dragon, Cancer to tell the story of their journey through Joel’s illness and his eventual death. The ups and downs they go through are told in the form of an interactive story, which is dotted with bits of poetry and snippets of conversations the Greens would have with their other children about Joel and his terminal disease.

As a game reviewer, you play games that are difficult and require you to pass a level with skill or deft puzzle solving. With That Dragon, Cancer, the difficulty level was way up high, but the obstacles were emotional.

For me, a father of one, That Dragon, Cancer was one of the most difficult games I have played and it left me with a giant lump in my throat. If you are a parent, this game will impact you on so many different levels. I not only saw Ryan and Amy’s struggle, but felt it right through to my core.

The game is all story and will take up about two hours of your life, which will feel like an eternity. I was engrossed in the story as the sequences took me through very real feelings of hope, spirituality, happiness and grief. It does not hold back on the morbid situation Joel is in. You feel the horror of his sickness, which he fights for four years despite originally being given just a year to live by doctors. The game lets you hear him screaming in pain and during nightmares. That just hits you in places you never knew existed; every fatherly instinct in me was looking away.

Interspersed with the main storyline are interactive experiences, featuring little skits, poetry and voice-overs from Amy and Ryan. These feel a bit forced, but they serve as a welcome break from the heart-wrenching story.

I admit, I would not want to play this again, but I am glad to have experienced it and now feel like I have shared something with the parents that created this game. Despite the difficulty of the subject matter this game deals with, I would urge you to try it out, to see the tsunami that is cancer and how this small child along with his parents stood against it. For now, I just want to hug my daughter real tight and thank every God out there for her.

That Dragon, Cancer is available for Mac and Windows for $14.99 ( 1012) on www.thatdragoncancer.com

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Published: 21 Jan 2016, 07:51 PM IST
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