It's not just waiting, I promise. It is a lot of waiting though.

too short, once you spend 9600 hours in this game it just feels like there isn't really anything left to do. unfortunately, steam's refund period ends 9,598 hours before then so im kinda stuck with it

One day I stumbled upon The Longing, but I didn’t fully grasp what I was signing up for. A game where time itself is stretched endlessly, where progress was defined not by battles or skill, but by patience. The Shade, who now sits by my side on the computer desk (just a plushie), a lonely figure, tucked away in a dark cavern, waiting for 400 days with no instruction, no purpose, just lots of time. I thought it was just a game, but as days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, I began to realize it wasn’t merely about a kingdom, its king or its servant. It was about me. This was not my first time meeting myself in a game, for I had traveled inwards into my own mind with Mountain.

I was accompanying Shade. Lost in the quiet corners of my own mind, waiting for something to happen. But as time wore on, it became clear: life doesn’t hand you transformation. It’s something you must carve out of the stone walls of existence, one slow, deliberate pickaxe hit at a time. Just like Shade had to do to progress in the mines.


At the beginning, the first dreary steps, Shade walked slowly, almost agonizingly slow. I was impatient. I found myself wishing it would move faster, explore quicker, cover more ground, see more places. Yet, as I watched the small figure tread carefully through the dark tunnels, I began to confront something I hadn’t expected: my own discomfort with stillness.

The Shade’s pace opposed my own restless heart. In most games I was always rushing without truly noticing where I was going or why. In the game, there was no choice but to slow down, to accept the pace, to be in the moment. And with that, a shift began. I realized that in my life, I was avoiding stillness because it revealed all the things I wasn’t ready to confront: fears, uncertainties, boredom. Sometimes I felt like making progress and then came face to face with a place I couldn’t go through, or I had to wait 2 weeks. These roadblocks felt rage-inducing to me at the beginning.

Just like The Shade, as days slowly went by, I started to accept that movement is not always progress. Stillness itself is a form of growth. To sit with yourself, in the quiet, is to face the parts of you that the noise drowns out. I would sit in my room looking at the screen, and Shade would sit in his small cave. The cave started as a cold empty space, and as days went by I found stuff to bring back to the cave and make it feel more like home.

see my shared screenshots


The Shade slowly walked through the sprawling underground world, and there were moments of discovery. A new cavern, a hidden room, a charcoal buried in the ground after falling from the ceiling. Some of these things held value immediately, while others seemed meaningless at first. But everything in this subterranean world had a purpose, though it was not always immediately clear. From time to time I got lost, thankfully Shade’s ability to return home came in very handy. Everytime I arrived back home all those things I found while exploring waited for me there, looking at the Shade’s yellow eyes for some short of emotion to surface, but none did.

And so it was in my own life. Each new experience, each challenge, each hidden corner of myself I unearthed began to weave together into a greater understanding of who I was. I had long been seeking instant gratification, instant meaning, yet this game, with its slow revelations, reminded me that not everything important is immediately visible. Sometimes, meaning grows slowly, like moss or mushroom in the dark tunnels. You have to tend to it, nurture it with patience and care. At the time of playing this game I was going through some strifes in life, and everything I learned from Shade I could use myself.

I watched Shade collect books to pass the time or make art in solitude, I reflected on the some pursuits I had once abandoned. I remembered important people in my life again, not because it would improve my life immediately, but because the act of reaching out to others and acknowledging their importance itself was worthwhile. I began to explore new horizons, new places, not with the expectation of finding immediate purpose but because I was learning to trust that meaning would emerge in its own time.

Shade was alone, but so was I, in many ways. Not physically, but emotionally. The game’s quiet, desolate atmosphere became a mirror to the isolation I had felt but hadn’t acknowledged. It forced me to sit with my solitude, to question why I feared it. In the stillness of the game’s world, I realized that loneliness wasn’t something to be escaped but something to be understood. Turns out loneliness is not to be avoided for the sake of it, it’s meant to be understood so when you fill that emptiness with something meaningful, you can cherish it. Solitude can be fertile ground for growth. It can be a place where the truest parts of yourself begin to emerge. In those long, quiet hours, I learned that I didn’t need to fill every silence with noise or every moment with distraction.
This perfectly ties into the gameplay, Time Manipulation. Filling the emptiness of the cave we called home helped. That's what I meant with “filling emptiness with meaningful stuff”. Items like books, drawings, a lit fire in the home and shiny crystals help soothe Shade’s loneliness, subtly accelerating the 400-day wait.

Every achievement I unlocked in the game came not from rushing, but from slow, consistent progress. And I began to see that my life, too, was like this. That the small, seemingly insignificant choices I made each day were slowly carving out a version of myself that I could be happier about each day.


Suddlendly, the 400 days dwindled, I had to decide what to do. I won’t spoil anything about the endings, I will just say that I reserved the best one for my last playthrough. And since I left the game rolling with the good ending cinematic, I could appreciate how long Shade had come, and how long I should also expect myself to go. We are never truly passive in life; we always have the choice to shape our own path, to decide when to break free, when to remain still, and when to move forward.

The Longing was a game, but it became a metaphor for my life. A reminder that transformation is not a sudden event, it is a slow, quiet process that unfolds in the background, in the stillness of everyday choices. And in that waiting, I became something more. I became myself.


The atmosphere in this game is absolutely incredible. The art style is really on point for those of us that enjoy underground kingdoms. Caverns went on for miles in the background, making me feel a very small thing surrounded by dark vastness.

Helping the atmosphere was also the music, the soundtrack really pulls everything together, specially The King. Everytime I heard that song play my mind would start drifting, imagining great halls and what the kingdom could have been before its unexplained downfall.

Reach the surface, get adopted by the humans and life happily for ever

Breathtaking, truly a remarkable way to convey and explore a theme through unique gameplay. The central thesis of this game is the passage of time, and it reminded me in a stressful period of my life that it's so important to be able to relax and appreciate the small things in life. Every minor obstacle the shade comes across becomes a question of what lays beyond it, and waiting to find out somehow becomes exciting, and even small discoveries feel substantial. But after waiting for the first couple of obstacles, I found myself paying less and less attention to the clock, and not for lack of interest. I realized that there was only a finite amount of environment left to explore, and it was a disservice to myself to burn through it all as quick as possible when there was so much time to pass still. The slow unlock of each room in the caves lets you contemplate every little thing you see, and really drink it in. The art direction and musical scoring are incredible, and you really can get lost in the atmosphere once you're immersed - it feels like peering into another world, and the shade is an incredibly endearing companion.

wait

I love this game.

This is by far my favorite comfort game