If you’ve been feeling lonely, you’re not alone … ironically enough. Our isolation has become structural, and not only is it measurable — it’s idolized. In recent years, public health officials have begun naming social isolation as a crisis with real, physical consequences. The scale of our collective, newfound loneliness is so large it warrants data-probing; we are spending more time alone than ever before, and it shows.
We’re all thinking it: The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t create this condition, but it did amplify it. Schools closed, routines collapsed and social lives shrank to screens and bedrooms. Even after lockdowns ended, research suggests that rates of depression, anxiety and perceived loneliness never fully returned to baseline. The world reopened, but something in us stayed closed.
I didn’t have the language or the studies for any of this when I first encountered The Longing during lockdown in 2020. I only knew the feeling setting in.
The Longing is, on its surface, a strange and antagonistic game. Developed by Studio Seufz, it asks the player to wait 400 real-world days for its intended ending. You play as the Shade, a small, soot-colored creature tasked with waiting until King — made of stone and sleeping deep underground — awakens. There is no combat, no traditional progression system and no urgency. Time passes whether you are there or not.
You can explore the caverns slowly, inching across massive spaces at a deliberately glacial pace. You can decorate the Shade’s living quarters, gather items, read books or simply sit. The game continues even when it’s closed; if you leave your laptop unopened for a week, the clock keeps counting down. Rushing to the finish line punishes you with the worst ending; waiting unlocks more waiting.
The central mechanic — and challenge presented — is to endure the time.
Sure, there are shortcuts, early endings to escape the wait and end the longing, but I wasn’t there for that. When I played The Longing, I was fifteen, bedridden and recovering from perimyocarditis — which caused heart failure. The pandemic had already hollowed out my sense of normalcy; illness finished the job. I was endlessly alone, cut off from friends, school and the familiarity of my own body. Time didn’t pass so much as it pooled.
The Shade felt familiar immediately. He was alone, afraid and unspeaking, sealed underground with nothing but time and obligation. I was too, my single-sized mattress somehow a cavern. For months, he was my closest companion: I explored every nook, cranny and infinite hall of his strange prison. I read books with him through the game’s in-world library: Nietzsche, Kafka and Homer. I did everything with him and let the days tick down together.
Something subtle happened as I played: When you improve the Shade’s living space by decorating it, making it warmer and more livable, the time passes faster. When he is comfortable, he smiles. Taking care of himself makes him happier. Hallelujah, right? Well, it was for a 15-year-old me.
The game taught me, quietly, that tending to yourself makes waiting more bearable. That building a small life inside confinement matters. That time feels different when you fill it with things you love.
Here’s the thing: once you finish The Longing, you cannot replay it. So when the endings started approaching, I avoided them. I unlocked every faster pathway and refused to take them. I didn’t want to say goodbye to my Shade.
No matter what, the clock runs down regardless of what you want; eventually, the King wakes. He lifts the Shade gently, declaring that he has destroyed the world to rid it of longing. They rule what remains together, forever.
And then the game ends.
I didn’t get to do that: There was no world remade for me.
I started The Longing just after my heart failed, and I finished it just before I had to return to school, still sick, afraid and feeling borderline inhuman. Obviously, we all had to reenter a foreign world, it just didn’t help that I was fighting in a foreign body.
But the game left me with something: It taught me to explore, to find things that made time pass more kindly, to build a life, however small, inside the waiting. I would never wake a King to rid the world of longing, but, somewhere in my mind, I still think of myself as that little Shade, learning how to live inside time instead of fighting it.
The time will pass anyway, and it is something to make our own.
Digital Culture Beat Editor Estlin Salah can be reached at essalah@umich.edu.
