Waiting for your baggage to cycle through a painfully slow conveyor belt at the airport. Staring at your cup noodles as the five-minute cook time seems to drag on for an eternity. Sitting in heavy traffic with nothing to do but hang fire until it clears. Life is a series of mundane, universally shared experiences and I ended up trying a videogame all about them.
While Waiting is, if the name didn’t give it away, a game about waiting. Wait for the bus, wait for the stamina to refill on my guilty pleasure mobile game, wait for the torrential downpour to end after telling myself I definitely didn’t need my umbrella today. Each scenario is presented in a sort of children’s storybook, Where’s Wally, style, giving me a small image of a larger situation.
I can, of course, simply wait it out each time. The bus will arrive, my stamina will tick up, and the rain will cease with enough time. But that wouldn’t exactly make for a fun game, so developer Optilluision peppers each level with things to do beyond the initial framing. I can take a bunch of flyers off a guy standing next to the bus stop, plastering them all to the shelter’s bulletin board. I can spend a lot of money in my mobile game—which, er, I dropped $500 of fake money on currency in While Waiting’s gacha level, only to blow it all on shitty armor—and I can find respite inside a cafe while the heavens open.
Some missions are more obvious than others, and puzzling some of them out took me an embarrassing amount of time in some incidents, but after a couple of levels I found myself thinking outside of the box a lot more than I had been initially. Some of While Waiting’s missions even play into those intrusive thoughts we’ve definitely all encountered once or twice in our lifetimes—jumping onto an airport conveyor belt, liking your own social media posts, stealing cool hats from a random passerby.
It’s a delightfully quirky insight into things that we may do and think about every day, month, or year, but never really discuss much. And hey, if you really do get bored while waiting, the game very kindly gives you a button you can spam to pass the time. It doesn’t do anything, as far as I can tell, but I did enjoy clicking it a whole bunch.
While Waiting has got that great whimsicality I felt when playing Thank Goodness You’re Here! late last year, and I’m always here for more neat, cartoony puzzlers bringing their own brand of humour to the table. While Waiting is now out on Steam, so we can all artistically waste time together.
