Hating Cancer and The Cutthroat Catharsis of Total Chaos

As a teenager, I watched my grandma fight and defeat breast cancer. For over a decade, my family smiled through every milestone, whether it was a birthday, an anniversary, or something else, happy my grandma could be a part of it. 

My wife and I welcomed a beautiful baby girl into this world earlier this year and my grandma hasn’t met her. 

She never will, because in 2023, she died due to returning cancer complications, and I wasn’t there. I was in France for a work trip, and I still so vividly remember the call I got that terrible evening. I remember the once delightful smells of the noodles before me, which quickly turned nauseating; I remember telling my coworker I had to leave, recognizing that he instantly knew what I had learned; I remember seeing a sunset so beautiful that words don’t do it justice, as if grandma was telling me, “I’m better now,” on my way back to the hotel, where I’d spend hours crying, wishing I could see her one more time, wishing I could squeeze cancer like a rotting orange, ridding this earth of its putrid juices. 

Wesley and his Grandma

I have always hated cancer – it takes and it takes and it kills and it infects and it taints and it threatens indiscriminately. 

I like to believe my grandma is in a better place, wherever or whatever that might be; surely she’s not suffering anymore, right? But she did at one time, and my grandpa, who has since told me countless times he’s ready to depart from this world to see her again, does, and my mom, who slowly watched her mom fight relentlessly a battle she’d eventually lose, does, and I do. Still, I have always hated cancer, but now I really, really hate cancer. 

 The rest of the this piece contains spoilers for Total Chaos

Total Chaos is a horror game in all the ways the genre typically entails. There’s blood and gore and monsters and jump scares and terror. But Total Chaos is also a catharsis, letting me take all manner of makeshift weaponry straight to the heart of a rot. Every thwack and swing, every gunshot, brought a smile to my face as I ripped through a mysterious disease rotting Tyler, both the protagonist and antagonist, to the core as he battles cancer, depression, and the recklessness with which those diseases affect not just the diagnosed, but everyone in its blast radius.

Fort Oasis was once a vibrant mining town that Tyler and his wife called home. But home became a cage for Tyler and his wife, the former unable to leave this now-decrepit place, the latter desperate to return to the mainland and be closer to family. Critically, she also cannot take the pain of watching Tyler’s cancer and subsequent depression morph him into someone unrecognizable, someone capable of crafting together sticks, rocks, nails, and hammer heads into weapons of destruction that he uses to lay waste to the cancerous hordes stumbling through Fort Oasis. 

These hordes consist of a few types of enemies that all blend into a lifeless amalgamation of blood, gore, and muscular atrophy. I could criticize this, but cancer is lifeless – void of the humanity which it feasts on – and so their design is apt. Like cancer, they are once recognizable conglomerations of cells that have become something I care not to give the space to breathe, and so I hack away at every. single. one. The game often encourages me to run ahead to safety; instead, I recklessly use each item in my inventory to guarantee every monster stays down and dead forever, bashing lifeless bodies long dead as I imagine each as a cell unable to stop growing, like the ones that attempted to desecrate my grandma’s beautiful soul. 

This is a horror game for them, but not for me. It is catharsis. 

Like the enemies my hatred gorges on, maze-like levels shed their mystery and become my stomping grounds for catastrophe. I search every nook and cranny for crafting supplies, medkits, and rotten food to continue my insatiable appetite so that the beatings can continue. Total Chaos is a constant fight between a game with mechanics like health, hunger, and bleed, and my desire to kill just one more monster in her name.

Throughout my 12 hours with Total Chaos, Tyler’s voice morphs into a melody encouraging me to go on. I’m reminded of the countless times I squeezed my grandma’s hand, asking – no, begging – her to keep fighting. And she did, for me, so I did, for Tyler. 

She just wanted to be free. He just wanted to be free. 

Defeating cancer is to outlast that poison. Cells scream in agony as chemo ends their torment, but so, too, does the rest of the body. Defeating cancer is to outlast those cells, for as the poison kills them, it also kills you. 

And so I continued surviving in Total Chaos, trudging through hedge mazes filled with exploding corpses, concrete forests, and flesh-ridden buildings, and deeper to the black, rotting, festering core of Tyler’s expanding ache. 

The finale: I must outlive Tyler. He is Tyler. Tyler is Tyler. 

One man desperate to fight, to restore… 

…the other, desperate to rest. 

There, and only there, did the bloodshed end as I pummeled Every. Single. Bullet at my disposal, straight into the heart of this pain. Then, he was free. The credits rolled. The chaos was over. But both darkness and light remained, hovering over Fort Oasis, watching over what was left.

I like to believe Tyler is in a better place, wherever or whatever that might be; surely he’s not suffering anymore, right?

If you or someone you know is struggling with cancer, the Cancer Support Community toll-free hotline is open 7 days a week and can be reached at 888-793-9355.