0.5 hours played
Written 20 days ago
[h2]This Isn’t a Review of the Game. It’s a Review of Why I Couldn’t Play It.[/h2]
THE LONGING is probably one of the most unique, fascinating concepts I’ve ever seen in gaming. A real-time countdown of 400 days. A lonely, passive, melancholic experience meant to be savored in slow, deliberate pieces. I knew exactly what I was getting into. I was ready for the patience. I wanted to sink into it.
What I didn’t expect was that the game would be literally unplayable on my machine unless I was willing to dive into config files or dig through forum threads to get basic functionality working.
You get two options out of the box:
Full screen—which, for a game this slow and passive, is absurd. I don’t want my entire monitor locked up for hours by a glacial existential cave-crawler.
Windowed mode—which on my system was so tiny I could barely read the text, with no way to resize it. Not by dragging the edges, not through settings. Just a postage-stamp-sized cave and unreadable UI.
I’m sure there’s an .ini file somewhere that fixes it. I’m sure some saint on a forum has written up the workaround. But I have a rule: if a game’s whole premise is “do nothing slowly,” then the least it can do is let me see what I’m not doing.
And that’s the shame. Because from what I could see, I thought it was brilliant. I liked the tone. I liked the atmosphere. I liked the concept. It’s one of the only idle-style games I’ve ever been interested in playing.
So this thumbs down? It’s reluctant. I respect what this game is doing, and I absolutely see why it connects with people. But I can’t recommend it to anyone without at least warning them: depending on your setup, this game may be literally unplayable without technical tweaking—and it gives you zero help getting there.