REVIEW: ‘While Waiting’ Analyzes Life Through Its Quietest Moments

Waiting for your turn to come in a game of Uno. Waiting for traffic to clear before you can start moving again. Waiting for fireworks to start on a holiday. As fast as life can seem sometimes, everyone does a lot of waiting. Optillusion’s first video game, While Waiting, turns those moments into a collection of minigames ranging from delightfully silly to surprisingly heavy. The end result is a poignant and thought-provoking five-hour analysis on the experience of life, even in its slowest moments.

While Waiting follows an unnamed male protagonist through key moments of his life. We see him make friends, fall in love, lose that love, leave for school, and more. These times are represented through timed minigames, and before each one, we’re given a list of clues as to what we can do while waiting. When you complete one, you get a sticker in your book to signal you’re good to go.

(Oh, and each stage in While Waiting has a challenge that simply says “do nothing,” so the completionists out there will be playing multiple times.)

Each of these 100 minigames comes with its unique tone, and it’s never certain which one you’re going to get until you’re in the thick of it. One scene sees the child waiting to ride a carousel at an amusement park, and by pressing the WASD keys, we can make the child flop around while holding his parents’ hands, sometimes jumping higher than they’re standing. It’s hysterical in motion. Later, he’s waiting for his wife to give birth to their child, and he must sit and calm himself down lest he distract the doctors by making noise.

The way these little snippets not only capture the minutiae of life but do so with a range of emotions, is very impressive. The main problem lies in just how much waiting you have to do. There are times when a challenge is time-sensitive – meaning it can only be completed with a certain character or object on-screen that will eventually go away.

When that happens, the only thing you can do is, well, wait for the minigame to end. Sometimes, the end is clearly signaled via a countdown or something similar; other times, you have no idea when the game will advance. That can be frustrating, even for a video game designed around the act of waiting, and it may turn a few people off.

That said, when the minigames work, they work wonders. The best ones are those with allegorical meanings or interpretations hiding under the surface, which, on discovery, allow for a few “aha!” moments. A favorite of mine comes during the man’s adult years, in which he’s seen lying awake in bed in the middle of the night.

Slightly frustrating at times, While Waiting’s minigames still work wonders.

As he’s waiting to fall asleep, a thought bubble emerges with sheep jumping over the fence. I can raise or lower the fence at will, and the sheep can run into the fence and explode into a cloud, keeping him awake. After a few sheep explosions, another minigame appears with someone balancing on a tightrope, and I then control both the sheep fence and the balancing man at the same time. From there, a third game with a mouse collecting money will also appear, and I’m controlling all three.

After a while, the meaning of the scene clicked with me: This is anxiety in motion, the type of anxious feeling that is literally keeping this fellow up at night. The sheep aren’t jumping over the fence, so he can’t count them, which forces him to think of all the things he’s balancing in his life, which then balloons into money worries, and it could go on and on and on. We’ve all experienced something like this in our lives – heck, some of you reading this might have slept that way last night – so it’s immediately relatable and effective.

The elevator pitch, “This is a video game about things to do while waiting for other things to happen,” does not spark interest on its own. However, While Waiting does a great job of keeping things interesting during the monotony, with plenty of hidden secrets and silly objectives to help you while away the time. It’s not always effective; some waits are longer than others, and that’s frustrating, but once it starts rolling again, you’ll forget about the delay pretty quickly.

While Waiting turns the most boring parts of a person’s life into an equally reverent and irreverent look at life itself. The 100 minigames offer plenty of variety – even if some of them add to the boredom rather than disperse it – and the overarching story will tug at your heartstrings and tickle your funny bone.

While Waiting (2025) is out now on Nintendo Switch and PC.