While Waiting is a narratively driven puzzle videogame that follows one man across his lifetime by exploring the many everyday moments he spends waiting. These moments encompass an impressive number of varied scenarios, almost one hundred in total, each with unique details and contexts.

An overwhelming number of these waiting scenarios are transient, ordinary, and even boring. Waiting for the bus. Waiting for an elevator. Waiting for Cup Noodles to hydrate. Others capture longer periods of waiting, existing in the backgrounds of our day-to-day lives, even as we wait for other things to happen in the short term. Waiting for a paycheck. Waiting for a publisher to accept or reject a book proposal. Waiting for an adult daughter to visit. Some scenarios indulge in more fantastic waits. Waiting for the sun to rise during a zombie apocalypse. Waiting for a neglected child’s final match to burn out on a freezing winter night. A few scenarios are profound. Waiting to be born. Waiting to die. Some are even meta. The first scenario tasks me with waiting for the tutorial to explain the videogame’s mechanics. The last asks me to wait for its credits to roll. Scenarios vary in tone and length. Some are tragic. Some are comic. Some are absurd. Some are mundane. Many are one or two minutes long. Others take several minutes more.

A few of the waiting scenarios are repeated across the player character’s life and the recurrence is always for a significant reason. As a child, the player character waits for Santa to arrive, unaware that the gift bringer is his father in costume. As an adult, he takes his father’s place, waiting for his own child to fall asleep before unpacking their presents. Many scenarios take place on New Year’s Eve, though with major differences. As a child, the player character tries to ditch his friends to be alone with his crush. As a college student, he bitterly spends the night with his roommate as his new girlfriend is away. As a career-driven adult, he ignores the celebration while he tries to finish a project before a deadline. Revisited scenarios always come with a unique spin that represents the passage of time and the player character’s growth into adulthood.

As While Waiting begins, heavenly narration presents me with a notebook. Each scenario is represented by a page from this notebook, listing goals that may be accomplished while the player character waits. When he completes a goal, it is marked by a sticker in the notebook. Almost every scenario has multiple goals to complete and they are as varied and wild and wacky as the scenarios themselves. Only one goal is shared across every scenario: Do Nothing.

Completing the Do Nothing goal for all of While Waiting’s scenarios in a single sitting takes about three and a half hours. That’s almost four hours where I do not interact with the videogame at all, except to keep my console from falling asleep. I still think it’s interesting. The only tools offered to help me endure these hours of waiting are digital fidget toys unique to each level, such as a clicking button, a spinner, or a squeaking bear plush. I may activate them with a controller button or I may ignore them. They have no function in any scenario.

Since doing nothing is the only goal shared across every scenario, it feels like the central “path” through the narrative. Doing nothing feels polite and appropriate in most scenarios, like waiting for the player character’s boss to talk through a PowerPoint presentation. At other times it feels defiant, like waiting for his parents to finish lecturing him for sneaking out of the house at night. In a few scenarios, the player character’s non-action is unsettling. When his family is gathered in a hospital waiting room to hear news about the health of one of their own, his stoic immobility amidst their emotional upheaval is unnerving.

While Waiting is minimalist in its presentation and storytelling. Aside from simple instructions that introduce and conclude the narrative and brief descriptions of each scenario and goal, it eschews most written words. I never learn the player character’s name. Non-player characters’ thoughts and feelings are implied through their animated reactions instead of through dialog. The player character himself is an enigma among them all, often having no reaction to anything that happens around him. 

I feel like I understand the player character best when he does nothing. It seems like his natural state. He is not an inert character. He does not let himself be a plaything of his world. He has aspirations and goals, reaching joyous milestones and suffering crushing disappointments. He is not without compassion and love for his parents, for his college roommate, and for the several partners he is paired with during the story. He feels like a character who can contentedly endure the unexciting moments of his life and is easily overwhelmed by the significant ones. He is ordinary, if a little too reserved.

While Waiting is far from over after I have watched the player character do nothing for almost one hundred scenarios. The real fun comes when I revisit previous scenarios to take control of his avatar and pursue the many other goals in the notebook. Each goal encourages me to push against the initial boundaries set by the scenario.

Many of these goals emphasize the mundanity of what the player character is waiting for. While waiting for his morning toast, the player character uses a spoon to catapult the remains of a cereal bowl across the table. During a car ride to the airport, he repeatedly raises and lowers a window to clean a stain of bird excrement from its surface. When the Wi-Fi goes down, he impatiently taps the computer’s power button in the vain hope it will fix the problem—and the lamp’s power button, and the clock radio’s power button. Tiny, frustrated moments like this are immensely relatable.

Other goals require much more effort. They transform the scenario into a short and often intense puzzle. During a power outage, the player character tries to squash a bug by tracking the noises they make visible as waves against the darkness. While playing hide and seek, they can peek through a gap in their hands to see where their friends are hiding—though if they’re caught cheating, the puzzle resets. Some puzzles are especially difficult, like the player character playing mahjong or sudoku in order to finish a related goal. If I don’t already know the rules to these games, While Waiting makes no effort to teach me.

The most fantastic goals completely reshape the structure of While Waiting’s reality. While waiting for his parents to go to sleep at night, the player character can pick up a sledgehammer and ensconce himself inside a pot, turning the remainder of the scenario into a parody of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy as he tries to pull himself up an inexplicably expanded set of shelves using only the sledgehammer as leverage. Exploring the depths of his grade school desk turns into a round of Tetris with his books as the puzzle pieces that disappear when a line is completed. During an uneventful soccer match where the player character serves as a goalie, examining a cloud shaped like a raygun places it in his hand and fills the field with round targets that must be shot. 

These most inspired goals make me question the nature of the player character’s world. Is he an especially imaginative person and these transformational goals represent his daydreams? Is he a conjurer, able to take his wandering thoughts and make them reality? Does he live in a world of magical realism and all of these marvelous events are really happening? Are these just what they are, extra goals included in a videogame with no extra meaning to them? If the player character’s nature while doing nothing is half of what makes While Waiting thought provoking, then these most wonderful and impossible side goals are the other half.

I have a satisfying time playing through While Waiting’s scenarios once, doing nothing, and again, trying to accomplish as many of the other goals as possible. When I think of replaying the scenarios a third, fourth, or fifth time to try and complete every possible goal, I find the notion repellant. Though its premise may be ingenious and its goals novel, While Waiting isn’t much fun to play because of one grievous flaw that I feel across almost every scenario.

It takes me a while to notice this flaw. It is completely hidden while completing the Do Nothing goals. When I revisit the scenarios to complete the other goals, it becomes impossible to ignore: the player character moves with the speed and urgency of a slug on depressants. When a scenario occupies a single screen, this is irritating. When a scenario consists of larger spaces the screen must pan across to capture, or even the rare few that consist of multiple rooms, the player character’s languid movement speed becomes infuriating.

This movement speed is especially troublesome on the more action packed goals. One particularly difficult scenario contains recreations of classic arcade videogames like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. They are faithfully recreated, quarter-ravenous difficulty and all, and made more tenacious by the unresponsive player character who has entered them. Completing this scenario’s goals is made even more aggravating because failure causes the cabinet that contains the recreation to sprout legs and run away across the screen. The player character must pursue it at his casual walking speed if I want to try again. Add onto this that most scenarios have a specific length whereupon it immediately ends, requiring many restarts to finish the goals within the time limit, and many of While Waiting’s most strenuous goals are simply too annoying to finish.

If I were to try and finish every goal in every scenario, a new layer of absurdism is added. Many goals may only be completed at certain points in a scenario. If I have a particular amount of trouble with one goal, I can wind up repeating its scenario many times and spend many long, uneventful minutes waiting for a single event like a man to run by in the rain using his briefcase as an umbrella. 

When I consider all this mandated waiting, I start to wonder: By forcing me to wait through long periods of the player character’s waiting to accomplish arbitrary goals, is While Waiting playing a prank on me? Is going for one hundred percent completion the ultimate practice of waiting in this videogame about waiting? I try it for an evening and decide it’s too maddening to pursue every goal. I’ve gotten the best out of While Waiting. I’m ready to move on.

Despite this sour end to my playtime, I find myself with a great deal of admiration for While Waiting. It takes an impossible premise that shouldn’t work as a videogame and makes it work. Completing the Do Nothing goals presents an unusual portrait of a player character who may well be neurodivergent. Completing every other goal shows the sheer amount of imagination put into creating them. This easily could have been a one hour time burner with a dozen different scenarios. Instead, I am presented with one hundred scenarios, almost all of them unique, presenting far more kinds of waiting than I could produce in hours of brainstorming. My frustration with the sluggish controls and lethargic player character is the only thing keeping me from giving a gushing recommendation. While Waiting is a fearless videogame, unafraid to challenge players with an unorthodox premise, unafraid to be uneventful for long periods of time, and unafraid to believe that someone like me will come along and say “this is actually pretty great.”