Game: While Waiting
Genre: Adventure, Casual, Indie
System: Steam (Windows)
Developers | Publishers: Optillusion
Controller Support: Full
Price: US $19.99 | UK £16.75 | EU € 19,50
Release Date: February 5th, 2025
A review code was used, with many thanks to The Amplifier Group.
While Waiting is a hand-drawn, animated puzzle game about waiting for things to happen. It has several puzzles and many strange and interesting ways of having fun while you wait.
What is While Waiting Like to Play?
While Waiting starts you off in line to be born, in order to beat the level, you have to do nothing. You just stand in line, waiting with the other souls about to be sent down to earth. If you try to cut in line or move around, you get booted out of line. If you try to jump down, you get tossed back into line. The only way to finish the level is to wait, and wait, and keep waiting.
Once the two-minute timer is up, you have defeated the level, and you can move on to your life. While Waiting is split into the milestones of your life; you begin in childhood, then move on to college, adulthood, and so on.
There are 100 levels in total, and almost all of them have stickers to collect for trying out weird things while you are waiting. Sometimes, it’s something as simple as keeping the top of your ramen to make sure none of the steam gets out or trying to set a clothing dryer on fire.
Isn’t Waiting Boring Though?
Well, sure. Waiting can be boring. However, While Waiting introduces the concept of finding fun and amusing things to do between all the big events in life to get time to pass a little faster. It has some of the weirdest little puzzles; sometimes, you are trying to electrocute yourself in a crosswalk, and sometimes, you are trying to pet a dog. But no matter what is happening around you and how long you spend pushing buttons or playing with objects, the basics of the game are waiting, waiting, and waiting for the fun or important thing to happen.
While Waiting might sound boring, but it’s all about making your own fun. Sure, you could not click a single button during your whole playthrough and just watch as the scenes go by. You could try to collect every sticker before moving on to the next level, or you could play around and get what stickers you can while going out of the way to play with all the animals in the level. The premise of While Waiting never gets in the way of you playing however you want to play.
The Pros of While Waiting
While Waiting is beautiful and funny, and it has a lot of weird mini-games inside. It’s a little bit of everything, and it has a lot of heart in it. It feels like a well-loved project that someone really wanted to make perfectly, and the developers succeeded. It’s fun, unique, polished, and attractive.
If I were to compare it to something, I would probably have to pull out the really strange titles from the bottom of the barrel. Things like Mom Hide My Game or Warioware. It’s a weird little game, and you will know almost immediately if it’s for you or if it is not. It does sometimes get a little boring, but every level has a fidget toy to help you get through the most waiting-est parts.
The Cons of While Waiting
The music of While Waiting is incredibly repetitive. If you want to play it with the sound on, be prepared to listen to the same song over and over again for a long time. There was a sound puzzle in one of the levels, and I was so upset that I had to turn the music back on that I ended up just not doing that sticker. I’m pretty tone-deaf, which means the puzzle would have taken me too long anyway.
Another con of While Waiting was that some of the movement was really finicky. I wish it had been a little easier to click on certain buttons and things like that; the hitboxes were a little small, in my opinion. However, it didn’t completely ruin the experience. There were just a few different levels that seemed to have small things you needed to press or spaces you needed to navigate.
Conclusion
While Waiting was fun, it was weird, it was unique, and it was a lot of time waiting around for things to happen. Overall, this strange little game is exactly what it claims to be in the Steam description. I had a lot of fun with my time in the game, and I hope to be able to finish it soon (I’m nearly done). I very rarely go back to a game after I have finished reviewing it, even if I liked it a lot unless there was something really special about it.
I think this might be one of the games I make a little time to finish up in the very near future.
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot
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