Steam’s Most Intriguing Slow-Burn Adventure Game Takes 400 Real-World Days to Finish

Somewhere on your hard drive, a small, wide-eyed creature named Shade will keep standing alone in the dark, waiting on a ticking timer to go down, whether you’re there, watching as well, or not. After you download The Longing, this will be your fate (and Shade’s) for over one real-time calendar year. Shade serves an underground king who has fallen into a 400-day sleep to recover his lost strength. Shade’s only job, and his entire reason for existing, is to wake the king when the time comes. He’s a sentient alarm clock, and now, so are you.

In The Longing, an adventure/idle game from Studio Seufz, as your king sleeps peacefully, you’ll spend much of your time shuffling Shade through hand-drawn caves at a punishingly slow walking pace. You’ll decorate your small underground home. You’ll draw pictures with lumps of coal you scavenge on your subterranean adventures. If you’re so inclined, you can read the complete text of Moby Dick in game. And then tackle The Secret Garden or Thus Spoke Zarathustra. While this game isn’t just a simple reading sim or dressed-up timer, the vast majority of the game’s progression does run via real-world time, not skill mastery or minigames or fetch quests. A patch of moss might need two full weeks to grow soft enough that Shade could survive a fall onto it. Mushrooms you’re counting on for various in-game objectives might need a full month to mature. A stalactite will drop to bridge a gap that was previously uncrossable, opening up new space for exploration (…but only on the game’s schedule!). Tunnels will collapse without warning, closing old paths off for good, so, hopefully you’ve made time to see them. Goodness knows you have enough time on your hands. Did you use it well?

The intimacy this game offers is both eerie and surreal. You’ll find yourself with a new appreciation for your surroundings and how they shift over time. The “idle” half of the game does precisely what it promises: Assign Shade a task, close the game entirely, and, next time you check in, whether it’s a day or a month later, he’ll have completed it. Keep the game open while you’re accomplishing other things in your real-life space, and Shade will sit down on the cave floor and keep you company, occasionally muttering to himself about the water dripping nearby.

As one might expect for a unique game like this, the reception is mixed. Steam’s reviews for it currently sit at a Very Positive, and many people absolutely love this game. Some even restart the whole 400-day clock from scratch after drifting away for too long, unable to shake the feeling that they’d abandoned Shade and couldn’t simply pick back up where they left off. Others wonder what the point of this game is. One critic called The Longing “Animal Crossing: Depressing Edition.” Depending on who you are and what you’re looking for in a gaming experience, that could be a compliment or a warning label. Your choice.

Image: Studio Seufz

While there’s no map to consult if you get lost, no traditional inventory screen, no way to die of hunger or thirst (Shade doesn’t need food or water), there are tasks you can complete, locations to explore, dangers to avoid, and multiple endings to pursue. Will you get the “right” one, in which you, hopefully, wake up your king on time? Or will you get one of the game’s more ambiguous endings, the kind that offers no clean explanation for anything you’ve seen? These are valid questions, but perhaps not the biggest one I had about this game: Why does it feel so intriguing when it’s a game about waiting…something that feels like pulling teeth in my actual day-to-day? I think it’s because the game puts a spotlight on that experience — waiting — instead of making the wait something secondary and forgettable, simply to be endured before an activity that matters more. The Longing has been compared to John Cage’s 4’33”, a piece that consists of a pianist sitting in silence. Both are experiments that make a point about what art is, our attention spans, and whether or not we can be dared to sit through something quiet or boring when we’re used to TikToks that feel long if they’re over a minute.

Here, spend even a handful of real days with Shade, and you’ll notice yourself checking in on him less as you would an annoying app, and more as you might check in on a friend — with a mixture of curiosity and care. It’s a strange thing to feel for a goblin-shaped smudge of pixels standing alone in a cave, but that’s what The Longing does to you. Set a reminder. Start the game today. Next fall, you’ll have a very strange appointment to keep. In the meantime, there’s a coal-scribbled home for you to decorate, a stalactite’s slow collapse to wait out, and 1,282 pages of Moby Dick that aren’t going to read themselves.

The Longing is available to play on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC.