The Longing
Four hundred days of solitude
PC
This game doesn’t especially care whether or not you actually play it. You can put down The Longing, uninstall it even, having never left the starting area – come back in a year or so, and you can still watch its ending play out. Once you’ve watched the game’s opening, and witnessed the creation of your character by an ancient king who then promptly turns to stone, a countdown begins. Four hundred days, until the king wakes once more and – his words – ends all fear and longing.
Those 400 days play out in realtime. Or, as designer and artist Anselm Pyta puts it, “one second in the game is one second in your life”. With the constant presence of a countdown timer at the top of the screen, it’s a terrifying memento mori. Do you ever worry you’re wasting your life playing videogames? Here. Now you can put an exact timestamp on it.
But as mentioned previously, The Longing doesn’t need you to watch every single second tick down. “The game also continues even when you’re not playing,” Pyta says. “A bit like an idle game or a Tamagotchi.” Cross this with a point-and-click adventure, and you should have a good idea of how The Longing works. With the mouse, you guide your little round-eyed shade around the game’s beautifully illustrated caverns, exploring and finding items to add to your inventory and even solving the occasional mild puzzle. The shade moves agonisingly slowly, so it takes an eternity to get anywhere, and most of the puzzles take the form of obstacles that will take you days or even weeks to clear. The game does everything it can to encourage you to close the window and make a mental note to come back in a little while. There are still 399 days left to go, after all.
All this isn’t intended to be cruel to the player, as far as we can tell. Pyta has a genuine fondness for idle games, namechecking the likes of Progress Quest and Clicker Heroes – with one problem. “I like playing them until I get to the point where I realise that I’m never finishing the game,” he says. “I think there’s no way you can leave the game and feel good.” Eventually you just have to put the game aside, without any closure or final reward. “It’s still nagging at your consciousness somewhere.”
The Longing is, in part, his attempt to fix this problem. The game has not only one ending but four, paying off whatever approach you choose: playing as a diligent servant of the king, or trying to escape the situation it puts you in, or just ignoring it for a year then returning to blow off the dust and collect your reward.
“I hope that players don’t feel the need to play everything again… It’s too masochistic”
Multiple endings might seem like an odd fit for a game like this. After all, they’re generally dangled as a way of encouraging us to replay a game, but that’s pretty much the opposite of what Pyta wants. The use of time is intended to lend the finale some emotional heft, a way to both communicate the character’s loneliness and to make revisiting your ending an unappealing prospect. “I hope that players don’t feel the need to play everything again, because in this case it’s kind of absurd,” he says. “It’s too masochistic.”
All of which surely puts a lot of pressure on the game’s final moments. Whichever one a player gets, it has to stand alone as their definitive ending and – at least if they stick to the proscribed path – pay off months and months of investment. Is Pyta prepared for that? “I think the different endings have different kinds of payoffs. Of course, the 400-day ending has the biggest climactic moments,” he says – but don’t expect to see a big out-of-nowhere twist. “It’s definitely an ending,” is all Pyta will tell us when we ask about it. “It doesn’t leave any questions.” Then again, though, maybe the events themselves don’t matter as much as the fact that, after a very long time, The Longing will allow you to just let go.