While Waiting Review - A Game About Waiting... But Is It Worth YOUR Time?

A quirky puzzle-adventure indie game that turns waiting into comedy! Is While Waiting worth your time? Watch myreview and find out!

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• While Waiting

• Studio: Optillusion

• Publisher: Optillusion

• Platforms: Steam

• Completion Time: Approximately 3-4 hours

• Price: $19.99 on Sale for $14.99 until April 3rd 2025

• Genre: Adventure, Comedy, Puzzle

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Hello everyone and welcome to the Good Game Lobby review of While Waiting, a puzzle-adventure comedy that gives us many different ways to pass the time while waiting for life’s next level. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on the latest indie game reviews and weekly newsletter.

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Optical Illusion

Optillusion could have one of the best studio names. They have a few games to their name, with puzzles as the main gameplay mechanic, and they have followed suit with their latest release, While Waiting.

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Why Waiting

Let’s get into the story.

You start off as a soul, packed in a line, awaiting your role to be born on Earth. Even before making it to your body, your soul has character—you can start to deviate from your path, jump out of line, or cause trouble to the point where guardrails need to be installed. You are the odd one out here, a unique one ready to defy all logic while waiting to be born.

The full game takes place between three main points in your life. It starts with you as a child, then young adult life, and concludes with you as a senior—all coming with the challenges of patience and waiting for small events and, at times, monumental achievements.

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Comedic Outtakes

The game has 100 levels to complete the main story, with you waiting for each level to end. You can legitimately just place the controller down and do nothing. The level will run its course, and you will move to the next one regardless of whether you are playing or not. I tested this with a few levels I was a bit frustrated with—I even did the dishes while watching a few levels.

The true gameplay, though, is how you spend that time waiting. Cover a billboard with flyers, pet a dog, play an arcade game using your imagination, or make sure you have all your belongings before you make it to the airport. It’s simple enough and doesn’t have a huge difficulty, but I did find that some areas where you would assume you could interact with something were just outside the space designated for it. Not sure what you would call it, but think of the hitbox in a shooter.

The comedic parts of the game are the ways you interact with things while waiting—hopping around a conveyor belt messing with other people’s luggage, doom-scrolling your phone waiting for someone to like your latest post, only to end up needing to fill in a CAPTCHA (which is hilarious to have as part of that level). One of my favorite levels is waiting for your parents to answer a video call, and you can choose what they will see when they answer. I decided to have the camera facing my semi-nude roommate. The parents loved it.

The objectives are sometimes straightforward for each level, but at times they are a bit more difficult to find. In those moments of waiting, sometimes you just want to get to the next level, while other times the level ends just as you are about to complete an objective or solve an Easter egg. It adds to the sense of difficulty in this easy-to-play game. No worries—you can always restart the level and try again.

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Charming Visuals

While Waiting is a very charming game with a hand-drawn illustrative style. It could easily be a cartoon show with the minimal movement and setup. The backgrounds and surroundings are mostly a black-and-white canvas. The items that you interact with or move in the scene are colored, almost like a coloring book. It has certain accents around the main area you interact with to give it an engaging atmosphere. It’s easy to put the protagonist in silly places during some of the funnier levels of the game.

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Sound Design & Soundtrack 🤷

The sound design for a puzzle-adventure like this is simple enough—scissors clipping, filling out a form, etc. The soundtrack uses many older songs that don’t need a license to be used, so it doesn’t have anything original across the board. I like to highlight a song from every game's soundtrack, but unfortunately, in While Waiting, I didn’t find one that stood out.

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Conclusion | Must Play

While Waiting took me roughly 3+ hours to complete the main game. It has many objectives to complete for each of the 100 levels, and you can choose. Rest assured that you can go back to a specific level after finishing the main game to complete any objectives you may have missed. It is easily a game you can complete in one sitting, but the waiting part of some levels can get a bit frustrating. Though I powered through in one session, I recommend taking a few breaks.

The price point for what’s offered also seems a bit high to me. The time it takes to play and the amount of actual gameplay makes it a bit steep, in my opinion, at $19.99. But considering sales are often on Steam, I would recommend waiting until a sale to pick this one up. Pricing is subjective, so take that into consideration.

While Waiting is a charming puzzle game with a comedic style that hides an emotional story underneath, one you chip away at while waiting for life's trivial or triumphant accomplishments. It gives you time to self-reflect because you also have to go through these awkward moments of waiting, trying to pass the time. Remember when a smartphone wasn’t just in your hands at all times? What were we even doing? While Waiting is a must-play for me. Let me know in the comments if you plan on picking it up.

Thanks to Lurkit for the review key.

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