As I write this review, While Waiting is playing in the background. What makes this game very different is that you complete the levels by just letting it be. It is, as the title suggests, by waiting that each level is completed. This makes While Waiting in many ways quite unlike anything I’ve played before. It starts from the earliest stage in life; you are waiting to be born. Here you stand in a queue… and wait. Then comes all the events that constitute life in a row, which have the same theme, where you are waiting for them to happen. Each scene is only a few minutes long and you can move your character around, interact with some objects, and there is a list of small achievements to complete. This means there is something to do while you wait…
There is a very original design idea here. In everything from the way it looks, to the classical music that adorns the visuals, and, of course, the whole stillness. It’s a bit like a visual novel without all the text, like a walking simulator but only in still images. The game follows the anonymous character throughout his life, be it waiting for the bus, waiting for a lesson to end, waiting to be fed. It is presented as small paintings from one of those books where you fill in the colours yourself, except no colour is filled in and most of it is just empty silhouettes, minus the things you can interact with.
It is precisely by examining the small environments that you tick off the things on your to-do list. Only a brief hint is given and you simply walk around and touch everything that can be touched. If you’re the kind of person who likes to do all this stuff, you’ll have to do a second playthrough, as one of the criteria is to “do nothing”. However, it is perfectly fine to just leave the game alone in that case and let the levels pass one-by-one.
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While Waiting is very difficult to judge on pure entertainment. It even starts with some words of warning that it’s all about waiting and can get boring at times. That’s probably got something to do with how I feel rather torn about the whole experience. It’s quite enjoyable to watch life slowly unfold, and the idea of following a character all the way from birth and through life is unique. The various scenes are pleasant, but well, not much happens… I think the whole concept should have been broken up with something that varies it, but at the same time, the risk there is that the vision itself could be lost. When I get the chance to play Snake on a TV or sort books like in Tetris, it still feels like these little puzzles and interactivity massively upheaves the boredom.
This game requires a lot of patience, especially if you choose to actively engage with it. If you just let it run in the background and look at the pictures and listen to the music, it becomes quite pleasant to follow the whole life of the character. But at the same time, it’s very slow and, as I said, completely devoid of variety in terms of gameplay mechanics. With a hundred levels, it really has time to go through all possible scenarios in life, however, there are some quick jumps, especially between childhood and adolescence, and some scenes feel more like copies of each other. Sure there’s a lot of queuing in real life, but here you could have removed a third of all these scenes and there would still have been a lot of them.
About a third of the way in, you have to wait at a pedestrian crossing. This scene is, at the least, very short, but there are too many of these rather uninteresting ones. I also think that the classical music does not always match the scenes. It’s as if the developers got a little too eager with the piano loops in attempting to spice up the game.
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I would like to give credit to the incredibly creative basic idea. It’s a very original concept with a lovely visual style, so it doesn’t feel like a complete waste of time. But in the end, unfortunately for me, there’s a predominant feeling of boredom rather than quality entertainment.
