Right now, on somebody’s hard drive, a small wide-eyed creature named Shade is standing alone in the dark watching a timer tick down. He’s doing it whether anyone’s watching or not.
Download The Longing and that becomes your arrangement too, for more than a full real-time calendar year. Shade serves an underground king who has fallen into a 400-day sleep to recover his lost strength. Waking the king when the time comes is Shade’s only job and his entire reason for existing. He’s a sentient alarm clock. Congratulations, so are you.
The clock runs whether you play or not
The Longing is an adventure/idle game from Studio Seufz, and while the king sleeps, you’ll spend most of your time shuffling Shade through hand-drawn caves at a walking pace that can only be described as punishing. You’ll decorate your small underground home. You’ll draw pictures with lumps of coal scavenged on subterranean trips.
You can also read the complete text of Moby Dick inside the game. Then move on to The Secret Garden or Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
This isn’t a reading sim or a dressed-up timer, but the vast majority of progression runs on real-world time rather than skill mastery, minigames or fetch quests. A patch of moss might need two full weeks to grow soft enough for Shade to survive a fall onto it. Mushrooms you’re counting on for in-game objectives might need a full month to mature.
A stalactite eventually drops to bridge a gap that was uncrossable before, opening new space to explore, but only on the game’s schedule. Tunnels collapse without warning and close old paths off permanently, so you’d better have made time to see them. You have plenty of time on your hands. The question is whether you used it well.
Close the game and he keeps working
The intimacy here is eerie and surreal. You start paying attention to your surroundings and how they shift.
The “idle” half does exactly what it promises. Assign Shade a task, quit the game entirely, and whenever you check back in, a day or a month later, he’ll have finished it. Leave the game running while you handle real-life business and Shade will sit down on the cave floor to keep you company, muttering to himself now and then about the water dripping nearby.
Some players restart the whole 400 days out of guilt
The reception splits, which is what you’d expect. Steam reviews currently sit at Very Positive, and plenty of people love this thing outright.
Some of them restart the entire 400-day clock from scratch after drifting away too long, unable to shake the feeling that they’d abandoned Shade and couldn’t just pick back up where they left off. Others wonder what the point is. One critic called The Longing “Animal Crossing: Depressing Edition.”
Compliment or warning label, depending on who you are and what you want out of a game. Your call.
No map, no inventory, no way to starve
There’s no map to consult when you get lost and no traditional inventory screen. Shade doesn’t need food or water, so you can’t die of hunger or thirst. What you do get: tasks to complete, locations to explore, dangers to avoid and multiple endings to chase.
Will you land the “right” one, where you wake the king on time? Or one of the more ambiguous endings, the kind that offers no clean explanation for anything you’ve seen?
Fair questions, both. But the one that stuck with me is why a game about waiting feels this intriguing when waiting in my actual day-to-day feels like pulling teeth.
The John Cage comparison earns itself
My theory: the game puts a spotlight on the waiting instead of burying it as something secondary and forgettable, to be endured before the part that supposedly matters.
The Longing has drawn comparisons to John Cage’s 4’33”, the piece where a pianist sits in silence. Both are experiments about what art is, what our attention spans have become, and whether we can be dared to sit through something quiet or boring when we’re used to TikToks that feel long past the one-minute mark.
Spend a handful of real days with Shade and you’ll catch yourself checking in on him less like an annoying app and more like a friend, with curiosity and a little care mixed in. Strange thing to feel about a goblin-shaped smudge of pixels standing alone in a cave. That’s the game.
The Longing is available on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC.
Set a reminder. Start today. Next fall you’ll have a very odd appointment to keep, and in the meantime there’s a coal-scribbled home to decorate, a stalactite’s slow collapse to wait out and 1,282 pages of Moby Dick that aren’t going to read themselves.
