Game review: That Dragon, Cancer - a different kind of fight
When Ryan Green’s one-year old son was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour, he wanted to preserve memories of him and share their story with a video game, writes Sarah Kaplan
You are in a hospital room at sunset, the angular light casting long shadows across the blue and green walls. You’re wearing glasses and a rumpled green shirt, and your demeanour – even in this rough-hewn, pixelated form – is exhausted. You carry yourself like you’ve got too much on your shoulders. Which you have.
Somewhere in this animated hospital room, a baby cries. Your baby.
The light fades, and the wailing gets worse. You can’t see your son, but you can hear his screaming – the terrible, animal howl of a child in so much pain. You click around the room, searching desperately for something that will soothe a small child dying of cancer – you bounce him, you feed him juice. “Shh, Joel,” you say, “Shh.” But nothing works.
You slump down in the chair, defeated. And you pray.
“Oh God, I want him here with me,” you say. “Please.”
The crying stops. Joel is asleep, at peace – for the moment. The screen fades to black.
This is a scene from Ryan Green’s intimate and innovative new video game That Dragon, Cancer – a gut-wrenching exploration of what it’s like for a family to lose their young son to a terminal illness – which was released on Tuesday.