As the New Year looms, a look back at how games helped one writer get through a battle with cancer.
In case you couldn’t tell from the headline, this is going to be a fairly personal article. At more than one point while writing this piece, I stopped and thought ‘hmm, do I really want to bare my soul like this to thousands of people on the internet?’
I lost more than six stone in 2020, as the cancer ate away at my body and my energy levels dipped lower and lower. In a sense, the diagnosis was a relief; I had been plagued by uncategorized aches and pains, and the paranoid uncertainty of what was happening to me was washed away by a wave of dreadful confirmation.
I took a leave of absence from work - at the time, I was writing for Maximum PC magazine - and spent a lot of time gaming to distract myself. Whether it was on my desktop at home, playing on my phone on the couch, or taking my Switch with me to chemotherapy sessions, I had my eyes almost perpetually glued to a screen. Games provided me with a level of distraction that TV, movies, and music could not; immersion that demands your attention.
Roguelikes have exploded in popularity in recent years, with hits such as Hades, Returnal, and Dead Cells topping sales charts and delivering enduring appeal thanks to their never-ending nature. I’m not going to differentiate between roguehere because I find the divide trivial; some claim roguelites are less pure since they allow items, upgrades, or cumulative progress to carry over between playthroughs, but I’ve always thought of it as more of an evolution of the genre.
That feeling of progress doesn’t have to come in the form of tangible power boosts, either. Slay the Spire’s tight card-based combat inspired a slew of card-battlers in the same vein, but few manage to truly emulate what makes it great: the learning aspect. Slay the Spire is a game packed with overlapping card effects and complex interacting mechanics, and the only way to master those mechanics - and reach the top of the Spire - is to experiment and inevitably fail a lot along the way.
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