The Longing

When playing this game, the thing that immediately stood out to me was how perfectly accurate the title was in relation to the profound experience that the game provided, a resonance that became increasingly powerful as time went on. Everything about this is based around the concept of desire, or longing, from the moment that it begins and you're told by the king to wait 400 days to awaken him in order to "end all fear and longing". What this does is twofold, not only providing the player with a vague goal that gives a sense of mystery, but establishing a vague idea about the player's character, someone created to fulfill the duties of this mysterious king and longs to do so. The almost complete lack of dialogue past this point, with the main thing to read being the inner monologue of the shade who you play as, makes a lot of room for player driven narrative to begin emerging, with a gigantic cave system to explore.

This approach of player driven narrative is handled extraordinarily well and is the main reason why I found the game to work so well, as despite the game never telling you to outright do anything other than wait for the king, the goals one should be striving for feel relatively clear, or at least they did to me. This is handled through paying attention to the shade's general mood, starting off with the player wanting to explore the seemingly endlessly branching cave systems to discover the secrets potentially hidden within. Once the player finds some loosely scattered pieces of paper or perhaps some other bits and pieces laying about, and heads back, they'll find that the shade's home is more welcoming and comforting than anywhere else. This skews the player's goals from aimless exploration, to finding more objects to brighten up the shade's home and fulfil his desire to be able to make waiting a less painful, empty experience.

The way the game continuously is able to give the player new goals ties perfectly into the themes it presents throughout, where no matter what situation we're in, we continue to desire things in a constant cycle, with us reaching our goal just making way for the next thing we desire, now that it feels that much closer to achieve. The connection one establishes with the shade as the game progresses is also tantamount to it being so successful at what it goes for, seeing the increasingly lonely, sad nature of him causing the player to try and figure out how to to end this constant, empty desire he has. This becomes especially powerful once more about the world of the game is revealed, to the point where what once was a meaningless exploration of the cave systems, followed by trying to make waiting feel less tedious, to attempting to figure out if there's any possibility of escape. At its core, The Longing is a game about loneliness and desire, and it's able to impactfully convey these concepts through every aspect of itself.

The gameplay has mostly been sidelined until now simply because it's one of those experiences where it feels secondary to the other aspects present, along with something that I feel a bit more mixed on. What I mean by this is mainly that I feel incredibly sorry for those who tried consistently actively playing this without doing anything else at the same time, because this game is very slow, almost meditative at points. One of the core aspects of gameplay that rears its head time and time again is waiting for things to happen, and it certainly makes sure that it takes its time at certain point, with some puzzles making you wait for decently over 10 minutes in the same spot for something to happen as an example. There are many aspects of the game that are rather cryptic as well, with a lot of experimentation and time needing to be put into figuring some of them out, though it's almost all within the bound of reasonability if you just stick with it and use what little information the game gives you to devise solutions. While this is certainly not for everyone, this sort of approach to gameplay is something that I love, making every small discovery feel like something absolutely massive.

There's not much more I can really say before I start delving into specifics and spoiler territory, but I must say, this was a profoundly moving experience that definitely won't be for everyone, especially those who want their games to be more gameplay oriented. Nonetheless, despite some issues I had, such as wishing that there were a couple of quality of life improvements to cut some of the more pointless tedium that started creeping up about halfway through the game, I would definitely recommend this to those who are looking for something truly unique. The sense of loneliness the game evokes is absolutely astounding, with the understated dungeon-synth OST and impeccable art direction further contributing to my love of this one of a kind experience.