I loved this game. I can't decide whether to give it four or five stars, because it had major gameplay and technical issues (which usually would get a game a maximum of three stars from me), but I loved it so much that I think I would play it again despite those issues, and I'm not much of a game replayer. I suppose the fact that it's short helps with that.
I don't think I'm going to do a pros and cons list for this one; somehow, it seems wrong to me. Maybe it's because my impression of the game feels more nuanced than that.
I guess I'll start by introducing the game. That Dragon, Cancer is a little indie game that takes about two hours to play. It was made by a small team, and it's the story of Joel Green's life, and his family's life with him, from the illness that led to his diagnosis with cancer at age 1, through his death at age 5. It's made up of a series of little point and click vignettes in Joel's life and his family's life, it combines nonfiction and fantasy, and it's very story-focused.
This was by far and away the most emotionally intense game I've ever played. Maybe I haven't been playing the right kinds of videogames; it's true that I mostly play "kid's games," but that's mostly because I won't play anything with gratuitous violence or anything that objectifies women (looking at you, Final Fantasy. Give those girls some clothes.) I don't think I've ever cried at a videogame before. I cried watching the trailer for That Dragon, Cancer. It was hard, and terrible. But it was hard and terrible because it was real. So many videogames are emotionally intense because they're contrived. They have torture, or the main character's loved ones all die in terrible ways, because the developers or writers wanted people to feel something while they played it, so they picked out the worst thing they could think of, I guess? But to me that's just stupid. I don't like to play those games either, emotional distress for the sake of pain. They feel gratuitous, like the violence. They aren't real, to me. And it's not that I only consider things real if they're nonfiction; for example, I consider Lord of the Rings very real, because the kind of pain it presents - for example, perseverance in the face of a task that seems by all accounts to be impossible - is pain that almost everyone has felt. This game was not contrived. It couldn't be, because it really happened. It's the story of what a family actually went through, complete with their real voices, the real laughter of their dying son (taken from home videos), the real pain they felt. When I was crying, it wasn't for a made up character in a situation that would never really happen, it was for actual people who lived through this. I loved That Dragon, Cancer for that.
The game mechanics were fairly terrible. I had a lot of trouble figuring out what I was supposed to do, and once I figured it out, I generally had a lot of trouble doing it. That definitely impeded my immersion. There was also this one scene that I had to play through four times because you can hear sections of it from the point of view of four different characters, and you can only hear the last section one way before the scene forces you to end. Actually, there were several scenes kind of like that, where I was exploring and didn't know I was choosing to end the scene. I've read a lot about That Dragon, Cancer, and in its original incarnation (before Joel actually died) it was significantly different, and had much more clear game mechanics. I sort of wished I could play that version, too, because the way Ryan Green (one of the two developers, and Joel's dad) described it, it seemed like in that version, the game mechanics were actually part of the story instead of being mostly a (tedious) background. The way it was, I felt like I could have gotten almost as much out of it from just watching it? But I'm not sure; there's something powerful about living the story yourself, even if it's only in a very surface way. I just think it could have been even more powerful if I'd gotten to live it in a less surface way.
Lots of people talk about this game's explicit religiousness. It is explicitly religious, and not just in a surface way. That's one of the things I love most about it, actually. I'm a devout Catholic, and it's really hard to find videogames that feel like they're actually talking about my life. Videogames usually don't talk about God, or they have gods who are terrible and vengeful and killable and nothing like the God who's such a huge part of my life. That Dragon, Cancer is about the God I know, and about struggles I actually have with Him. I consider this game to be primarily simply a celebration of Joel's life, but secondarily about the problem of pain, and the difficulty of figuring out the seeming contradiction between God's promises to hear our prayers and the fact that even the prayers that seem most noble often don't get answered with a yes. I have two terrible, chronic illnesses - infertility and anxiety/depression - so this is extremely relevant to my life. It made me feel visible in a way I have never gotten from a videogame before. And best of all, its treatment of these issues felt . . . appropriately complex? The mom character (Amy) and the dad character (Ryan) in the game deal with their son's illness in very different ways in the context of their faith, and neither of those is really ever presented as the right one; it's more like they're different ways, and they both struggle, and maybe they come to the same place at the end. At least the same place at heart. It's important to me, also, that the game does not end with a miraculous healing. I love stories like that, but they often make me feel alone - because I've asked God for miraculous healings, and it hasn't happened, for me. And honestly, for every story like Heaven is for Real or Miracles from Heaven that ends with a miraculous healing, there are probably hundreds at least of stories that don't, where the parents and the siblings and the church community prayed and prayed and prayed for a miraculous healing and it didn't come. So I think That Dragon, Cancer is important because the kid dies in the end. The miraculous healing the parents have been asking for and to some degree expecting doesn't come, and they have to deal with that. And they do. So thank you, Ryan and Amy Green, for telling your story anyway, even though it didn't end the way you wanted it to, because there are a lot of us in your situation to one degree or another and it means a lot to feel seen.
I didn't always understand what the game was trying to tell me. A lot of the more metaphorical parts were just really confusing to me. When I read up on the game, I learned more about some of those parts from reading what Ryan Green said about them and that helped me enjoy the game a lot more. So, if you're playing the game and feeling confused, I suggest googling for articles :).
That seems like about the end of what I thought about That Dragon, Cancer. I thought it was true and beautiful, and I think my life is different for having played it.
