While Waiting review | Eurogamer.net

While Waiting is a game that belongs in a gallery. It’s installation art, and maybe you know the kind. It’s a lark, but a difficult, complex, ponderous lark, if such a thing is possible. It’s WarioWare designed by Beckett. It’s Super Bartleby Bros. It’s a game about waiting, a state of being that so many games are designed to try and minimise or avoid entirely (or sell you ways to jump past, granted). And yet just as waiting pops up in games even when designers are trying to avoid it, waiting can disappear utterly when you try to focus in on it and it alone. While Waiting. So it’s about the things you do as waiting is taking place. But does that mean you’ve ceased to wait, or that you’re still waiting and you’re doing this other stuff too?

These are philosophical questions of absolutely the least importance, if you ask me, but they can still be exhausting to pick at, the kind of things that won’t let go when you’re trying to get to sleep. And While Waiting – this is a compliment – is exhausting too, in its own way. It’s knackering to play, particularly when you aren’t really playing it. Is it interesting? Absolutely. Is it fun? Not really, but I very much doubt that’s the point. Did it reorder the world a little and reveal it back to me in a slightly altered way? Good question.

While Waiting presents you with a bunch of scenarios that involve waiting. You’re queuing for something. You’re waiting for a bus or for the rain to stop. You’re waiting for the Wi-Fi to sort itself out. You’re waiting for your partner to give birth. You can simply sit back and watch each scenario unfold, and then painlessly move from one to the next, or you can meddle around with them somewhat, moving your character about, fussing with things, messing stuff up.

To help you with this, there’s a list of optional objectives that come with each scenario. They’re only vaguely hinted at, though, so you need to interpret the rather delphic instructions you’re given and layer them onto the possibilities around you. So you’re waiting for fireworks to go off – anything you can do with a balloon at this point? One of the objective clues definitely seems balloon-shaped… You’re waiting for your college chancellor to finish a speech. It’s a hot day. Any chance of an ice cream?

All of this is delivered with an art style I would describe as lurking somewhere between indie comic and in-flight safety card. This is a continuum I had not really considered until I played While Waiting, but the results are easy to interpret and quietly uncanny, which feels like a perfect fit for the task at hand. At a push, I would say the thing the art most reminds me of is the illustrations in the books my daughter was given at school when she was learning to read.

Interaction is also interesting, in that it’s a little annoying, and in a way that feels like this is on purpose. Movement is slow and floaty, and animations can be unpredictable. It can be hard to do things precisely, as in one challenge when you’re trying to push your way through a crowd on New Year’s Eve. Even as I type this, though, I realise that pushing your way through a crowd on New Year’s Eve is not one of the easiest things to accomplish anyway, so maybe the interaction is expressive. Also, the controls have to rebuild themselves between each scenario, which can’t be easy. One scenario will be first-person and you’re in bed trying to keep your eyes closed. In the next, you’re out on a hill in third-person pointing out landmarks. What While Waiting’s trying to do, then, is tricky.

As the scenarios pile up, it becomes clear that we’re exploring a single life. And as the game moves onward, hopping from one pause to the next, it becomes clear that While Waiting is not really about waiting anyway, but rather about the time that somehow races past when you’re focused on life’s minutiae. It’s about the way that time only speeds up as you age – the way that, to paraphrase Martin Amis, the Atlantic Monthly becomes the Atlantic Fortnightly, the Atlantic Weekly and Daily. To put it slightly differently, it’s about the way I look up from the window or the laptop screen one day and notice that my daughter is almost as tall as me. What will the world look like next time I deign to notice it?

This is rich territory, if you ask me, and While Waiting belongs to a seriously interesting tradition. Last week, while I was waiting for a train to arrive, as it happens, I read John Cheever’s story The Swimmer, which I’m now about to spoil utterly if you haven’t read it yourself. It’s about a young guy at a pool party who decides he’s going to swim back to his home through the pools of all of his neighbours. What begins as a bit of fun starts to turn weird, though. There’s the sense that time is passing around the swimmer in a strange manner, that the neighborhood is changing and becoming unfamiliar, and that he’s falling out of favour with the friends he passes on his way. And waiting for him at home…?

Both While Waiting and The Swimmer seem deeply interested in life – what it’s made of, how it unfolds, and how easy it is to miss important details. Both are larks, in a way, but difficult, complex, ponderous larks. You know, if such a thing is possible.

A copy of While Waiting was provided for review by developer Optillusion.