Review: WHILE WAITING Feels Like a Goo Goo Dolls Song

A cartoon man sits at his cubicle desk and stares at a computer with a blue screen indicating it is updating.

This month, Optillusion Games released their latest puzzle video game, While Waiting. The game is now available for PC and Nintendo Switch with an MSRP of $19.99. The team was kind enough to supply me with a review code, but all thoughts are my own.

Told via a unique comic-book style art presentation that brings every special moment to hilarious life, While Waiting is all about…waiting - waiting to be born, waiting for your suitcase at the airport, waiting for that bathroom stall during a gastrointestinal emergency, and even waiting in traffic.

Wait while life’s moments pass you by and beat the game or take control of your destiny and explore the game’s 100 different scenarios and discover hilarious, touching, and downright bizarre ways to turn the waiting game into so much more.

I want to start by sharing that While Waiting is not a game for everyone. You take on the role of Adam throughout his entire life span (and beyond). Each level (100 in total) is more or less on a timer as you have to wait for a stated event to happen, such as waiting for the bus, but there are different ways to wait. Every level can be completed by literally doing nothing.

The game took me about five hours to complete, so if that’s your approach you can think of it as about 2-3 movies. However, each level also has different things you can do as you wait with specific goals unlocking stickers (basically in-game achievements). These include things such as helping your daughter obtain a mystical sword from a hidden stone a la King Arthur.

If I’m honest, I feel like the trailer does not do a good job with actually showcasing what you do in the game. I watched it a few times before playing and it did not help me understand what to expect from the game.

I’ll be completely honest, I did not care for While Waiting. I got bored by the halfway point and the last few times I hopped on to finish it felt like such a chore. My wife even asked me once if I really needed to play it anymore and I explained that I would merely because I knew I was close to the end. So where did Optillusion Games go wrong?

The number one place they went wrong was that the game just feels clunky to play. You have essentially four controls: movement, interact, menu, and fidget. The fidget rotates between a few options such as a spinner, a button, and a switch and literally serves no purpose except to give you a button to press while you do nothing and it serves that purpose fine.

Movement overall isn’t that bad either, until it’s not just moving your character. There are times when you interact with something and the perspective changes to a first person perspective and you start controlling your hand and those feel clunky, especially since it is hard to know if your finger is in the right position to interact with it when you press that button.

I think the idea behind While Waiting is to promote “making the most of life” by not just waiting for life to pass you by. If I’m right, this is not always a good message to share. The way that my ADHD brain works, I am constantly trying to do things while waiting to “not waste any time.” Something that I’ve learned is that I need to be better about slowing down and just being in the moment and waiting for things.

Now, maybe that’s the true idea behind the game since you can choose to do nothing on certain levels. Unfortunately, While Waiting is a game and that means that I have built-in expectations. This could be experiencing a story, engaging in fun and challenging gameplay, enjoying a moment with friends, etc. When trying to take that break and slow down by completing the levels by doing nothing, it just feels like a waste of time (the antithesis to what the game appears to be wanting).

I don’t know anyone who likes to boot up a game and then just sit there. It also doesn’t help that your actions have no consequences. Whether you do something or nothing, Adam will eventually move on to the next level and everything will be the same regardless of your past choices.

Another problem I have with the game is that on subsequent boots, there’s no Continue option. The Play button is automatically highlighted and if you press that thinking it will pick up where you left off, you are wrong. It just starts the game over.

To pick up where you left off, you have to go to Levels and then you can select any level you’ve already started. It’s a small thing, but really annoying and easy to accidentally start over (requiring you to wait a few minutes to access the menu and quit so you can go back to the main menu) instead of picking up where you left off.

Now, that being said, I do like the art style. It's a very comic strip-like style and that can be pleasing with no complaints. It also is not intensive and has incredibly low system requirements meaning that you can play it on just about anything.

Either I did not catch the vision behind While Waiting, or it’s poorly implemented (or maybe both?). After probably 30 minutes I was done with the game and continued for this review but found myself to be extremely bored and looking for things to do while waiting for levels to complete or for me to have enough energy restored to care about playing a few levels.

I’m sure there are people who will enjoy this game (it has a lot of positive ratings on Steam), but I clearly was not one of them. In short, it ends up feeling like a Goo Goo Dolls song (if you know, you know).