Picked up the game because concept seemed neat. A game that will end at a certain point, a point that you can't really bring closer and simply have to wait.

In the meantime, you can go around exploring the cave and seeing what you can do. The only problem is that your character walkspeed is deliberately made to be so slow that you have to treat this as an idle game.

Point your little guy to go somewhere, tab about, then tab back in after 5-10 minutes to see if he finally arrived. If there's maybe a new way to go you still have to sit there and watch him walk for 20-30 seconds.

This pretty much sucked out any enthusiasm out of exploration. I tried to engage with it at first, but after a little over an hour I just had no patience for it.

I am never bored. I will die at some point, and the amount of engaging, interesting, enjoyable, or otherwise worthwhile things I can be doing until that happens is insurmountable. So why would I boot up The Longing and deliberately break off my attention from something else to keep designating new tasks and destination to this little guy?

"But it is a game about patience, about longing, that's the point." The point is lost on me then. I fail to see what this experience tried to communicate that I either don't already know or would care to know.

There are neat things to do while you're biding your time. Like decorating the little guy's room or reading public domain books. But I can also just not bide my time and actually read books that I want in a format that doesn't suck and not while sitting in my chair in front of a computer.

The ending you get after waiting for the king to wake up certainly seems to be going for something. It's not much, but it's definitely trying.

Went to see if there's a way to continue the game and potentially explore to see if there's something more interesting that I missed, but the creator intended this life altering experience to be a one-off, and as such the only way to restart the game is to delete your appdata folder.

I will respect the author's wishes and just not play a game that has nothing to say and somehow respects my time less than Ubisoft.

My longing has ended. And much like Moby ♥♥♥♥, which I read the entirety of during my playthrough, I struggle to put into words how I feel about this game. I guess the short answer is that I loved it. This will probably be one of those games I come back to again and again, even though I know I'll never again recapture the magic of those first-time discoveries.

This game is more fun to discuss and think about than it is to play. I can respect its merits as an artistic piece, but I wouldn't recommend it for anyone else to actually invest time into outside of research material.