THE LONGING

The best description of THE LONGING is in a positive review with 315 votes, and it reframes the whole thing:

The simplest way to describe this game is as a sort of "reverse" clicker. Rather than shooting for a high score, you're seeking out multipliers and actions which aim to reduce the daunting 400 day wait.

That's exactly right, and it's why this game belongs in a library like ours. Every incremental game is secretly about time — how much of it you spend, how much the game gives back. THE LONGING removes the disguise. The number going down is days of your actual life, and the game is completely honest that you may as well go and do something else.

What you actually do

You play a Shade, the last servant of a dwindling king who has gone to sleep for 400 days to recover his power. Your instruction is to wait. The countdown runs whether the game is open, closed, or uninstalled.

From there it's your choice. Explore an underground kingdom, find furniture and decorate your cave, grow moss on the walls, or read — the game contains a library of real public-domain books, added in a 2020 update, that the Shade reads at his own unhurried pace. Certain discoveries shorten the wait; others just make it nicer. There are multiple endings depending on what you did with the time and where you are when it runs out.

The art is beautiful, hand-drawn and gloomy in a warm way, and the Shade himself is remarkably good company for a creature who barely speaks. A 283-vote reviewer: "I have only known this little shade for three hours, but if anything ever happened to him I would kill everyone and then myself."

The criticism is really a warning label

Waiting appears in 45 of the 100 most-helpful negatives, slow in 43, walking in 28. But read them and most aren't angry — they're cautionary.

The top negative, at 1,165 votes, is the clearest and most generous piece of criticism in the whole corpus: "It's not that I don't LIKE The Longing, but rather… I would struggle to think of anyone I would recommend it to, even in the sense of a general audience… The Longing isn't really a 'game', in the sense that most people think of a game." Another, at 91 votes, opens by wishing Steam had a neutral option — the third game today where the binary vote fails the reviewer.

The substantive complaint, and I think it's the fair one, is that the world is smaller than the premise. A 143-vote reviewer: "The game world was not nearly as large as I expected." A 78-vote one: "there's just not enough of it. Slow multi-day exploration/waiting would work [if there were more to find]." You can exhaust most of the map in a handful of sessions and then genuinely have nothing left but the clock — which is either the point or the problem, depending on your patience.

The related irritation is that playing well tends to mean reading a guide, since the wait-shortening discoveries are easy to miss. The most-upvoted positive review of all, from a 675-hour player, says so cheerfully: "Use of guides/walkthroughs/discussions allowed me to fully enjoy the adventure."

The clock problem, dated properly

Two reviews with heavy vote counts describe something that sounds alarming: the game's anti-manipulation system accusing honest players of cheating. A 164-vote review from 2022 switched from PC to Steam Deck and was told it had been "manipulating time", made to click a button 400 times, and had its clock reset with no way to recover the save. A 96-vote review from 2023 simply opened the game after two years away and was accused of the same thing.

A game about patiently waiting punishing you for patiently waiting is a striking failure, so it's worth being precise about how live it is. Searching the whole negative corpus turns up exactly two such reports, one in 2022 and one in 2023, and none in the hundred most recent English reviews. Full Steam Deck support shipped in July 2022 and maintenance updates followed in April and June 2024.

So: a real problem, well-documented, and apparently historic. Worth knowing if you plan to move the game between machines, not a reason to avoid it.

Six years on

Negative reviews by year run 20, 33, 11, 12, 12, 7, 5 — a spike in 2021 and a long quiet decline since. Recent English reviews sit at 93 of 100 positive, slightly above the lifetime figure. This is a game that found its audience and kept it.

Studio Seufz announced a new game in May 2026, so this remains a finished, self-contained work rather than an abandoned one.

The verdict

THE LONGING earns an 8. Originality scores a 9.5 and I'd defend that against almost anything in this library — this is a game that took an idea most designers would use as a gimmick and built an entire melancholy, beautiful world around it, including a functioning library of real literature.

It isn't higher because the objection its own admirers raise is true: there isn't quite enough underground kingdom to fill 400 days, the walking is slow enough to grate, and getting the most out of it nudges you toward a wiki. Gameplay scores a 6, and that number is doing something unusual here — it's low and the game is still excellent.

If you have ever left an idle game running and wondered what the waiting was actually for, this is the game that asks you the question directly. Start it tonight and check back in 2027.