The one bit of writing advice everyone should adhere to is “write what you know”. In this case, the fact that the creators stuck to this piece of advice is the game’s great tragedy, and just how closely they followed it is what makes the tragedy work so well. Everything is genuine. Not even the most allegorical piece of this game can be considered “pretentious”, because it’s abundantly clear that the creators actually went through the horrible experience that they’re depicting, with all its ups, downs, hope, fear, joy and despair.

The game itself isn’t exactly mind-blowingly designed or crafted and indeed quite flawed, but the experience is more than the sum of its parts. Some won’t be able to get into it, but I’d chalk that up to ill-fitting expectations or just a case of the game not being able to engage them; no accounting for taste. I, however, was thoroughly satisfied.

After a long time of hearing discussions and reading articles, I finally got the chance to play this game. Play? Well, more like experienced it.

In case you never heard about this game here’s a brief description:

“A video game developer’s love letter to his son; an immersive narrative driven experience to memorialize Joel Green and, through his story, honor the many he represents. That Dragon, Cancer is a poetic and playful interactive retelling of Joel’s 4-year fight against cancer.

Using a mix of first-person and third-person perspective, and point-and-click interaction, this two -hour narrative experience invites the player to slow down and immerse themselves in a deeply personal memoir featuring audio taken from home videos, spoken word poetry , and themes of faith, hope, despair, helplessness and love.”

That Dragon, Cancer sounded like a game that will make me sad and depressed, but it never happened. The reason is because it’s execution was underwhelming. Sure, the story is a tragedy, however it’s not enough to show a difficult (almost impossible) scenario like the one the game presents to us. You can say that most of the dialogues and the scenes are metaphors, but they never got me immersed the way I expected them to be (except when baby Joel was screaming and crying endlessly, which made me uncomfortable for a whole 5 minutes). The gameplay itself doesn’t feel natural at all. Again, you can argue and say that this game wasn’t meant to be fun, but only to be an interactive experience. Still, the mini games and the interaction itself was the same as a broken game.

Do I make it sound like I am a heartless bastard who only wants to have fun games with top notch graphics? Then you got the wrong impression. I know the story is heartbreaking and I know there was a better way to tell it than in a video game that barely resembles the emotional wreck the family experienced.