If you’ve been following me for a while you’ll know that I have a tendency to get sucked in by new gameplay ideas, especially when they’re a bit weird. With that in mind, when I saw info for While Waiting I was pretty excited by its potential. In it, your character is put into a series of odd scenarios where you’ll have the choice to interact in a variety of ways, or simply do nothing and watch it play out on its own. It’s absolutely a novel concept, and doesn’t play quite like anything I’ve experienced before, but the question was whether it was necessarily fun.

Working from the angle that would say yes, the variety of scenarios helps a great deal, ranging from situations that are a bit dull to those that are at least slightly more interesting. At the start of each level you’ll be shown a number of objectives you can try to meet, with descriptions that will at least give you a vague direction, but rarely make it clear what you need to do, as well as a consistent option to simply Do Nothing. In case you were wondering, in order to complete all objectives that obviously means you’ll need to work through each stage more than once, either simply to fulfill the Do Nothing option, or to work out a task or two you may have missed.

That leads to the side that may not be as enamored with the game’s unique style. Aside from the objectives often being abundantly vague, and some requiring trial-and-error experimentation to simply stumble into a solution, I didn’t feel much of a sense of accomplishment getting many of them. Whether that was because it was sort of an accident, that I knew what I needed to do but couldn’t work out mechanically how to make it happen in the right way, or that the controls were a bit wonkier than I’d like so it was a struggle, the experience is absolutely a bit inconsistent. To boot, I’d note that patience isn’t one of my stronger suits. So in some ways I would have preferred an option to fast forward or something like that if my goal is simply to stand there like a lump and let things happen around me, to help make completing that standing objective on each level less irritating.

This is absolutely a case where the very same thing that makes the game unique and potentially appealing could easily be its downfall depending on the player… even moreso than usual. While the different scenarios and objectives can be inventive, and there is a slow-burn story forming along the way, the line here between clever and tedious is a perilously thin one. However, if you’re looking for something more mellow and simply unique to enjoy slowly over a weekend, overlooking a few warts here and there, it may be just the thing.