The Longing-ist Playthrough 2022

*** Looking to catch up with the adventure? ***

I’ve always been a fan of weird and wonderful gaming experiences, and when I stumbled upon The Longing whilst writing up an article last year, my interest was thoroughly piqued. I was kindly gifted an Switch eShop card for Christmas, so I finally decided to pick up this quirky title and give it a go.

For those with no background on The Longing, the premise is simple but also a little odd. You play as a Shade; a rather Gollum-looking fellow who has to wait 400 real-time days in order to awaken the sleeping mountain king. It’s part point-and-click adventure and part idle game, where everything takes an intentionally long time and there’s no definitive objective aside from wiling away time in the mountain halls until you need to wake up His Majesty. Time will pass whether you have the game running or not and you can’t manipulate the clock to speed things up. From what I understand, whole chunks of the game are entirely off-limits until certain real-life time frames pass, so this is quite literally ‘playing the long game’. Since I started on New Year’s Day 2022, I’m expecting that my playthrough will finally finish on 5^th February 2023. (Sounds like good value for money to me!)

I appreciate that this isn’t a title that’s hot-off-the-presses (it was originally released in March 2020 for PC and April 2021 for Switch), but with a premise so unique I thought it would be fun to document my 400 day playthrough with a bit of a daily blog. I’m going to try and play a little bit of The Longing every day until the 400 days are up, and I’ll scribble a few notes about how things are going. I’ll be pushing each blog entry on our socials and I’d love for you to follow along!

Obviously, if you’ve chosen to follow along then there’s likely going to be a slow trickle of spoilers ahead as I discover and chat about new elements of the game. Please don’t read on if you’re looking to pick up the game as I wouldn’t want to ruin things for anyone. Equally, if you’ve already played the game please don’t post me any spoilers anywhere on our socials – this will make me both sad and rather grouchy. 

Catch Up

You can jump in to any day in the adventure by using the links below:

• Day 1: Part 1 – Exploring Beneath the Mountain
• Day 1: Part 2 – The Endless Halls
• Day 2 – Monty the Exit to the Palace
• Day 3 – Finding the Mattock…
• Day 4 – A Vision of the Outside
• Day 5 – Monty’s Diary
• Day 6 – The Face in the Wall
• Day 7 – Buying Advice
• Day 8 – Making a Mistake
• Day 9 – The Crystal Pool
• Day 10 – Starting Some DIY…
• Day 11 – Collecting Crystals
• Day 12 – The Bedroom and the Abomination
• Day 13 – Exploring the Mines
• Day 14 – Backdoor to the Library
• Day 15 – A Mushroom Garden
• Day 16 – Indoor Plumbing
• Day 17 – Searching for Supplies
• Day 18 – The Seeds of an Idea
• Day 19 – Another Dream..?
• Day 20 – So Near, Yet So Far…
• Day 21 – Hidden in Plain Sight
• Day 22 – An Evacuation
• Day 23 – The Wrong Bloody Mushrooms
• Day 24 – Show Patience, Maestro
• Day 25 – There and Back Again
• Day 26 – Sick of Frickin’ Mushrooms
• Day 27 – Eyes in the Darkness
• Day 28 – RIP Mattock
• Day 29 – Testing a Theory
• Day 30 – Alone in the Dark
• Day 31 – A Weird Feeling
• Day 32 – Autopilot…
• Day 33 – Almost Time
• Day 34 – Lonely, but Lonely Enough?
• Day 35 – I am the Darkness
• Day 36 – Colours and Bird Song
• Day 37 – Waiting at the Well
• Day 38 – Oops…
• Day 39 – A Change of Heart
• Days 40-74 – The Lost Days
• Day 75 – A Sinister Discovery
• Day 76 – A Fruitless Search
• Day 77 – Deja Vu
• Day 78 – Playing the Long Game and Winning