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The Longing released today, inviting you to wait 400 days to escape a caveLong for The Longing no longer
Long for The Longing no longer
There’s lots of things you can do in the game other than wait, of course, you can explore, make your Shade a little home, paint, or even try to escape if you’re feeling brave. Alice Bee is doing aDiary Of The Longingand, in her most recent entry, she made her poor Shade (who she named Burnsy) trip out on mushrooms.
“Today Burnsy ate a kind of mushroom that made them have a hallucinogenic trip/vision quest. They saw an old man and a young, red-haired child with a tail, raising water from a well on the surface. This is, I’m sure, a clue to help Burnsy in their escape!”
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
Time will pass in the game even if you’re not playing it, so you don’t need to check in on your Shade every day if you don’t want to. There are some things you can do to speed time up, Alice discovered thatjust spending time in the Shade’s living room will do that.
I recommend giving these diaries a read if you have a chance. While a game like this doesn’t really appeal to me personally, experiencing it vicariously through Alice’s writing is just as (if not more) entertaining. Here’s a little snippet from her fateful first day:
“A Shade achieves a lot in their first day! Mostly, it consists of walking, and discovering areas we can’t reach yet. The palace halls are a weird mix of ruined grandeur and damp, earthy caves that haven’t enjoyed any renovations at all. Lumps of coal regularly fall from the ceiling with a sad little echoey noise, and I collect them in the hope of making a fire soon. I briefly worry that we might enter a kind of The Descent scenario, encountering Bad Gollums, but that much excitement goes against the principle of the game.”
Apparently, The Longing is based on a real-life German legend, too, theKyffhäuser legend, in which “a King under a mountain is waiting for the right time to awaken”. You can also read real-life books in-game, drawn from the public domain archives ofProject Gutenberg.
The more I hear about this game the more intrigued I become - I can’t wait to hear what happens when someone manages to escape.
If all this has left you longing for The Longing, you can grab iton Steamright now for £13/€15/$15.
