This game is difficult to assign a rating to, since it's hardly a game. The atmosphere, art, dungeon synth soundtrack and minimalist storytelling are all extremely well-executed.

It's a game where you wait for 400 days. In real time. There are areas in the game that you can't get to for at least a month or two after starting.
You can have the shade wander (slowly walk lol) around the subterranean castle, grow plants in real time, find objects to furnish his bedroom with, read the entirety of Moby Dick (for real), and a ton of other things that I don't want to spoil.

My biggest complaint is that there are ways to increase the flow of time, so that the game doesn't literally take 400 days to play. This isn't clearly communicated, so I spent a lot of time thinking my game was glitched, or the timer was wrong.

A fantastic and atmospheric anti-idle non-game

Today, in the lemony light by your grave,
I recited Merrill: Why did I flinch? I loved you, then touched
the damp and swelling mud, blue hyacinths
your mother planted there—
ants were swarming the unfinished plot of earth
like the black text of an infinite alphabet. I couldn’t
read it. There was no epiphany, just dirt, the vast curtain
between this realm and the other. You never speak to me,
I thought, not even in dreams.
- excerpt from "Dirt and Light", Aria Aber

launched this back up today to see if it'd been long enough to finish the thing and stop guilting myself every time i looked at my steam library over not returning. the easy answer would be if i could say i'd dropped it specifically because she was gone but of course i know i'd put it down before then bc it's still there, when i go back through the chatlogs.

a piecemeal approach to the prosecution of enlightenment
it is very unsurprising, now, that you put down the longing
whereas i mainlined it until i found "the wonder"
and i think you might come out ahead, in the end

closing the book on this game has not led me to any great revelation, merely the continued knowledge that for external reasons i pretty much lost all desire to engage with/potential to get anything out of it a long time ago, even if by its very nature i was still 'playing along', in a way. an unsatisfying end, but what else is new.

🌫️

I never fully finished this game yet, but I absolutely love it. The slow progress really makes every small piece you do, make or travel rewarding. I get not everyone likes slow game play, but for me, I really just enjoy walking around as this little guy and reading books. This game made me actually read moby dick, which I would never do otherwise, and honestly it was quite the experience. I don't know, my brain is a bit stupid so even the minor tasks in a game make me want to do them, maybe that's the completionist in me talking.
Artstyle-wise, I really love this game as well. The scruffy lines and muted colors really fit the game. The quietness of the halls really calms me down in a weird way. I really need to replay this game...

In a nutshell; comforting loneliness

(Advertencia: el juego trata temas relacionados con la depresión y pensamientos suicidas)

En The Longing, la espera se convierte en la mecánica principal con la que te ves forzade a entender el mundo. Lo que años atrás criticaría Arin Hanson en su ahora olvidada reseña de Ocarina of Time como un accidente de diseño, aquí se explota y mezcla para crear una experiencia en la que las fuerzas de la soledad, la curiosidad y el aburrimiento juegan un equilibrio muy delicado entre ellas. A veces The Longing cae en el peligroso abismo de hacerte sentir que realmente estás perdiendo tu tiempo, que te valdría más la pena hacer trampas o jugar a algo que te dejase hacer más cosas más deprisa. Pero la oportuna salida de esta obra en tiempos de la pandemia debe haber calado bastante hondo entre una población de jugadores que, al verse imposibilitades de salir y mantener el contacto con el mundo exterior, tal vez pensaron apaciguar la soledad de esta Sombra aunque fuera un tanto. A mi manera de ver, The Longing es una ejecución soberbia de un concepto que, en cualquier otra época, se habría tomado a burla o como estrategia facilona con la que llamar la atención, pero que ahora, tras haber experimentado lo que realmente es sentirse sole, mucha gente puede entender por fin. Que algo así se haga, precisamente, en un molde como la aventura gráfica, donde el puzzle y la exploración mantuvieron desde siempre una alianza inquebrantable para contar historias de muy diversa índole, demuestra hasta qué punto este aparentemente minoritario género sigue teniendo la fuerza que tenía hace veinte o treinta años.

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(Content warning: the game deals with themes of depression and suicidal ideation).

In The Longing, waiting becomes the one mechanic with which you are forced to negotiate the meaning of the world. What Arin Hanson criticized years ago in his now-forgotten review of Ocarina of Time as an accident of design, we see it here mixed up to bolster an experience in which loneliness, curiosity and boredom delicately interact with each other. Sometimes the game sits close to the edge of making you feel like you're really wasting your time, that you'd be better off cheating or playing something faster. But the timely release of this work must have struck a deep chord among players who, seeing how it was impossible to go out, perhaps thought about spending more time with their Shadow instead. In my opinion, The Longing is a superb execution of a concept that, at any other time, would have been received as a joke or as a gimmicky way to attract attention. But now, after having experienced what it's really like to be alone, I think I understand. That something like this is being done, so precisely, in the classic graphic adventure mold shows how much vitality this supposedly fringe genre still has, even twenty years after its "golden age".

I have spectacularly conflicting feelings about this game.

My first few hours with The Longing were something very strange and special. Those first couple days of exploring this underground cave system, looking for purpose, and trying to see all the grim, lifeless wonder you can find down there, were meditative, mystifying and at times even magical. In these opening hours The Longing has a thick atmosphere of loneliness, solitude and yearning, and I was left wanting to spend more time in this world exploring these emotions.

After those early couple days though, a little over a three months ago, the game lost and never really regained that sense of wonder. There are two big reasons, the first being the time-gating the game utilises to stretch its content out over its advertised 400 days. You'll find areas you can't access until a week, two weeks or even a month after you initially discover them. The justifications for these are often very entertaining (well, I have to wait for moss to grow over that rock down there so that I can land on it safely, should take about two weeks), and this delightful mix of dry and absurdist humour is laced throughout the whole game, but the effect these enforced waits had on my playthrough were disastrous.

Whenever I'd finish all the content I could find I would leave the game for a couple weeks to come back post-time-gate, invariably forget that I was meant to return so leave the game waiting twice as long as I'd intended, would have forgotten a lot about the world and its layout by the time I did return, and would then be impatient to get to the new content having waited a few weeks to be able to access it. The ways the game asks you to be patient when playing it largely worked for my early days with it, encouraging the meditative tone I relished there, but the ways it encourages patience on a wider more meta level asking you to wait a substantial amount of time to access content were greatly to its detriment.

The other problem is that the game's attitude towards patience and waiting whilst playing was just pushed too far for me beyond a certain point in the game, around about the point when I found the mattock. Breaking crystals with the mattock can often take ten minutes, digging through walls can be similarly problematic, and that's not to get into the Hall of Eternity. I'm one of the people who found the meditative nature of the early game really rewarding and even I was ultimately forced to read whilst my shade did things, or to turn off the game whenever a particularly long task was initiated with the intent of returning later once my Shade had completed it.

I get what the creators were going for with all this, and I'm glad it seemed to resonate with some people very strongly, but ultimately I just wanted to be able to immerse myself in this world, my Shade's explorations, and the strange, ominous mood found here, and found the game pushing back against that frustrating. My first five hours of playtime were spent over my first couple days of playing and were very enjoyable; my latter five spread over three and a bit months ultimately resulting in me going for the worst ending as I felt like I had been done with the game for a long time already.

This game goes on without you there. Much like Animal Crossing, but with an ending that you long for, and maybe even dread, that steadily marches closer and closer.

The more time you put into this game, the more you will get out of it. One of the most unique and thought provoking experiences I have had. Atmosphere and soundtrack are 10/10.

This game took me 21.5 hours, sprinkled across 3 months to complete.