The Longing

Mechanics

According to the plot, the player's task is to guide the Shade until the stone king wakes up. However, unlike most games, in The Longing the days go by in real time, so it takes more than a year to complete a single run from start to finish. The game can end earlier and the adventure can be completed in several ways. Time can also be speeded up by performing certain activities (including lighting a bonfire with coal found in the caves), but this does not significantly affect the pace of the game. What's important is that the seconds run out even when we're not in the game or turn off the hardware with The Longing installed. So we can leave the hero alone or order him to go to a specific location and return to the game when the Shade arrives.

The basics of the game do not deviate from the scheme known from classic point-and-click adventure games. So we explore more places, collect items and solve puzzles. However, all these elements are based on actual time lapse. The hero cannot run, forcing us to march, and many actions can only be performed at a later date, for example when a decaying stalactite finally falls and creates a transition to a previously unavailable location.

In The Longing, we have no pre-established goal except to wait four hundred days for the King to awaken, so all the activities come down to taking time for us or the Hero. We can make the waiting more pleasant by searching for new secrets, playing on instruments made of collected elements, hanging pictures found here and there, etc. In addition, the authors have included full editions of many books, such as Homer's Illiad, Herman Melville's Moby Dick or Friedrich Niestchze's works. There is also no shortage of texts in the game itself, although they come down mainly to monologues and Shade commentaries, either spoken aloud or written down in a diary.

Game modes

Due to the nature of the game, The Longing does not offer any multiplayer mode.

Technical issues:

The developers of The Longing decided to use a two-dimensional, hand-drawn graphics. The graphics resemble the visual setting of classic animations, although the whole thing is kept in dark colours. The atmosphere of the game is further emphasized by a frugal, synthetic soundtrack.