Somewhere out there, on a stranger’s hard drive, a tiny wide-eyed creature called Shade is standing by himself in the dark, watching a countdown. Nobody has to be watching for him to keep at it.
Install The Longing and you sign up for the same deal, stretching past a full calendar year of real time. Shade answers to an underground king who has drifted into a 400-day slumber to rebuild his lost strength. Rousing him once the countdown ends is Shade’s sole duty and the whole point of his existence. He is, functionally, a sentient alarm clock. And now, congratulations, so are you.
The clock runs whether you play or not
Built by Studio Seufz as a hybrid of adventure and idle game, The Longing hands you hand-drawn caves to shuffle through while the king sleeps, at a walking speed best described as punishing. There’s a small underground home to decorate. There are pictures to draw using lumps of coal dug up on trips below.
The game also contains the full text of Moby Dick, readable start to finish. Finish that and The Secret Garden or Thus Spoke Zarathustra are waiting.
Call it neither a reading sim nor a glorified timer — but nearly all of the progression is keyed to real-world time instead of skill mastery, minigames or fetch quests. Two full weeks may pass before a patch of moss turns soft enough to cushion a fall and let Shade survive it. Mushrooms tied to in-game objectives can take a month to reach maturity.
Given enough time, a stalactite falls and bridges a gap that used to be impassable, unlocking fresh territory — but strictly on the game’s timetable. Tunnels also cave in with no warning, sealing off old routes for good, so you’d better have carved out time to see them. Time is the one thing you have in abundance. Whether you spent it well is the open question.
Close the game and he keeps working
What develops is an intimacy that’s both eerie and surreal. You begin noticing the space around you and the ways it changes.
As for the “idle” side, it delivers precisely what the label suggests. Give Shade a job, shut the game down completely, and he’ll have wrapped it up by the time you return — a day later, a month later, doesn’t matter. Leave it running while you deal with real life and Shade will settle onto the cave floor to keep you company, occasionally mumbling to himself about the water dripping somewhere nearby.
Some players restart the whole 400 days out of guilt
Opinion divides, predictably enough. Steam reviews currently sit at Very Positive, and there’s no shortage of people who adore the thing without reservation.
A portion of them wipe the 400-day counter and begin again from zero after staying away too long, haunted by the sense that they’d left Shade behind and couldn’t simply resume where they stopped. Others are left asking what the exercise is even for. The Longing earned the description “Animal Crossing: Depressing Edition” from one critic.
Whether that reads as praise or as a warning label comes down to who you are and what you’re after in a game. Your call.
No map, no inventory, no way to starve
Get lost and there’s no map to fall back on, nor any conventional inventory screen. Hunger and thirst can’t kill you either, since Shade requires neither food nor water. The offer instead: tasks to finish, places to explore, hazards to steer clear of and several endings to pursue.
Will the “right” one be yours, the one where the king wakes on schedule? Or will you land somewhere murkier, among the endings that explain none of what you’ve witnessed?
Both are reasonable things to wonder. The question that lingered with me, though, is why a game built on waiting is this compelling when waiting in my ordinary life feels like pulling teeth.
The John Cage comparison earns itself
Here’s my theory: rather than tucking the waiting away as a forgettable prelude to the part that supposedly counts, the game aims a spotlight directly at it.
Comparisons to John Cage’s 4’33”, the composition in which a pianist simply sits in silence, have followed The Longing around. Each is an experiment probing the definition of art, the state of our attention spans, and whether anyone can still be goaded into sitting through something quiet or dull in an era where a TikTok can feel overlong before the minute mark.
Put a few real days in with Shade and you’ll notice yourself looking in on him the way you would a friend — with curiosity and a trace of concern — rather than the way you’d tolerate a nagging app. It’s an odd sensation to have toward a goblin-shaped smudge of pixels standing alone underground. That’s the game.
The Longing can be played on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC.
Put it in your calendar. Begin now. Come next fall you’ll have a distinctly strange appointment waiting, and until then there’s a coal-scribbled home to furnish, a stalactite’s unhurried collapse to sit out and 1,282 pages of Moby Dick that won’t read themselves.