Why The Longing Takes Four Hundred Days to Play

welcome back the longing is a game that takes 400 days to play yeah you heard that right 400 days that's 9600 hours or 576 000 minutes the damn thing even has a four hour long trailer it sees you playing as this little gremlin fella who's called a shade who is created by the old king to essentially serve as a living alarm clock whilst he has a nap and charges up his powers this leaves you with 400 days to spend doing not very much you can walk very slowly around a bunch of boring caves paint pictures grow mushrooms and even read the entirety of moby dick all in real time the longing's primary mechanic is basically just waiting in order for new areas to open up you have to wait for a spider to spit a web a stalactite to fall from a ceiling and even wait for moss to grow and this can take days or sometimes even weeks to happen blessedly time still progresses while the game is closed but that's not exactly much of a consolation you might be thinking that this game sounds terrible and to be honest i was thinking exactly the same thing when i started playing but luckily i think the longing turned out to be pretty fantastic in spite of the fact that it is objectively boring somehow this game was able to get me to care about the shade keep me engaged for longer than a bunch of aaa games and most importantly of all teach me a fundamental lesson about how games motivate players all through the use of that big 400 day timer which brings me onto the subject of this video i want to talk about temporal mechanics that is to say stuff like countdowns loops schedules and all those interesting things in games that have to do with the chronology more specifically i want to explain how they work why messing with temporality is such an effective way to change a player's state of mind and to break down why this makes the longing one of my surprise hits of this year so far but if that all sounds a bit complicated my good friend tykas finley can break down what this video is all about very succinctly indeed hell it's about time let's start at the most logical point the very beginning time limits are probably the oldest and simplest temporal mechanic and it's really no surprise why they're so damn popular by lighting a fire underneath players forcing them to play at a faster pace than they'd ordinarily be comfortable with games can ramp up the pressure and force players into truly mastering what they're doing or create interesting decisions that encourage people to take risks and improvise in order to make the most of their limited time the oldest time limits can be found in arcade games and platformers and they serve a very important purpose by giving players finite time to tackle every obstacle not only is the difficulty increased but players also avoid the boredom of attempting the same thing over and over a time limit encourages players to roll with the punches and keep moving rather than obsessing over one tiny detail for example in pikmin getting all your parts before the 30 day limit is elapsed as well as not being caught out in the open at night time is pretty tricky leading to great tense situations as you rush to drag ship parts back to base or kill a boss before time runs out this leads to you making a lot of mistakes and having to take interesting risks as waiting around rebuilding your forces and taking things slow sometimes just isn't an option these exact same principles can also work in the case of narrative time limits vintage spoiler warning for mass effect 2 skip here if you don't hear small story details about an old ass game for the most part mass effect 2 has a very relaxed feel as you jet around space building up your ragtag team of badasses but once you get your hands on the reaper iff that allows you to enter the omega 4 relay and head to the final mission a secret countdown is started the next mission you go on will be interrupted by the normandy getting invaded and all your crew getting kidnapped and from then on every mission that passes without you going to save them leads to more and more of the normandy's personnel getting harvested for their delicious meat uses this time pressure creates a great moral choice between rescuing the fun side characters and doing the right thing versus being selfish and getting all your squadmates loyal so that they don't die in the final mission in my first playthrough having to pick which characters i really liked and which characters i was okay risking was an awesome choice and it was one i only got to make because of that soft time limit pushing me towards the final mission of course this being a mass effect game there's a way to get everyone loyal and also save all the crew but that is a whole different issue interestingly stuff like time trials and speed running mechanics are sort of time trials done in reverse and as such create the opposite play experience where time pressure created by the developer induces tense hectic gameplay when the onus for setting the limits is shifted to the player it instead encourages more thoughtful and almost zen mastery driven gameplay violet swing a grapple hooking vaporwave platformer is fun enough on its own but there's a sense of deep satisfaction you get from improving your times or finding sneaky roots and openings that you'd never be able to get if you are rushing through every level at top speed and not stopping to really understand and appreciate all the nuances of the level design and the grappling mechanic spelunky's ghost is a great example of both of these kinds of time limits in one whenever you enter a new level of the caves a two and a half minute timer starts which once elapsed summons this fella the ghost the ghost kills you in a single hit is unkillable itself and can even phase through blocks meaning the new players have to balance navigating through each level quickly enough to avoid summoning and being murdered by the ghost but slowly enough to avoid making a mistake and dying anyway as players get better and better at navigating to the goal they can use spare time to comb through each level for extra goodies and items racking up a bigger score however there's an additional layer to splunky's ghost any gems it passes through while hunting you down turn into super valuable diamonds so the time limit for expert spelunkers is more like the time they have to prepare for the ghost's arrival whereupon they make bank as they try to avoid it the ghost starts as some fun pressure for noobs stops average players from farming cash forever but lets experts show off their stuff in these ridiculously complicated dances that test their understanding of the platforming fundamentals surprise surprise splunk is great if time limits are responsible for motivating players through the threat of failure to go fast enough then what about time loops where players are forced to replay the same snapshot of time over and over they're sort of a limit but also effectively infinite in length how do they work well more often than not the function of a time loop isn't to motivate players through stress but to act as a reset button and give players the opportunity to explore the same locales and mechanics from a different perspective and equipped with new information minute for example sees you given 60 seconds to live and asked to solve a bunch of puzzles before you get respawned what this leads to is you gradually building up a picture of what needs doing and the fastest way to move around the map across various lives before finally executing it in a single perfect run the sexy brutal also uses time loops as a puzzle mechanic at the end of each day the nightmare casino your trap jin resets but you can use your knowledge of how your friends died in one loop to save them in the next for example once you know sixpence here gets shot you can save him by finding a blank cartridge during the next loop and inserting it into the murder weapon giving him time to defend himself fundamentally what time loops are great at is creating a sense of familiarity with an area cast of characters or set of systems with every go through the loop you're getting to know that play space a little bit better and uncovering additional layers of nuance as you go when you first start playing outer wilds the solar system beyond timber half can seem incredibly daunting with planets disintegrating teleporters going off and things exploding seemingly at random but with every loop you learn something new about how the 21 minutes of time you have plays out and that chaos slowly resolves into a sense of intimate understanding of the cosmic dance that plays out each time you wake up the events happening like brittle hollow breaking up or the tornadoes on giants deep always happen the same way but your understanding of them and how they work is constantly changing for example the dust storm on the twin planets starts off as a hazard that can crush you and suck up your ship becomes a fun time limit as the deposited sand fills up this network of caves before finally becoming an opportunity a sand leaving ash twin reveals these important end game towers this is the key to using time loops correctly when you think about it you can make the argument that most games have some sort of title over their call but games that really make the most of this mechanic are the ones that take advantage of the way our perspective and understanding can change over time through successive goes through the loop one really interesting example of time loops is in quantum league a competitive fps where you play the same duel three times alongside your previous lives meaning that if you shoot the enemy who killed you in the previous loop you can save your own life and other paradoxical nonsense this completely upends the fast-paced and twitchy nature of most fps and turns the game into something much more cerebral as each player figures out not only how to score points but also how to work around both their own and their opponents past lives the more rounds go on the more complicated your relationship with the battle landscape becomes with players laying down fields of fire and creating traps in round one that go on to define the terms of engagement right up until the final seconds of the game even games without narratively justified time loops can still engage with this core concept during your early assassination attempts in hitman you'll really only be getting a glimpse of the puzzle box that is each level but with each successive loop you'll be able to recognize the fundamental patterns and schedules that hold the world together and begin to manipulate them for example the central race that dominates the miami level ends exactly 17 minutes after you first start and you can use this to plan some really creative assassinations like trapping the garage or kicking the driver's dad onto the track at just the right time to get him run over by his daughter which is as amazing as it is completely brutal limits and loops are all well and good but i think to understand the fundamentals of our relationship with time and get our heads around why the longing works we need to think more simply and contemplate waiting that was five seconds of silence and it felt like an eternity right we as human beings are naturally impatient waiting rarely feels good in the moment but it can have its uses beyond simple padding by demanding a player wait for something to happen be it a special event the completion of a building or simply for a daily cooldown time to take over like in say animal crossing a game builds up anticipation and excitement in the mind of the player giving them time to think about what they'll do once the wait is over and also plan their future actions this way when things finally do happen the sense of achievement is heightened because of the build up and the player is going to have more appreciation for seeing the task completed incremental games are this principle turned into an entire genre all you're really doing in idol or clicker games is waiting until you can click a button to make waiting for the next thing slightly more efficient it sounds boring and unfulfilling but as anyone who's gotten sucked into a cookie clicker forager or universal paperclips will know the post-weight milestones these games hand out can be hugely rewarding and more often than not will give you a new system to play with or a new resource to manage to help keep things fresh and also give you new things to wait for the appeal of delayed gratification can also feed into some really fun optimization puzzles as players work to minimize the time they spend waiting and in the process only become more invested in the time eventually elapsing more often than not games will have several of these gratification loops going at the same time ensuring that the player always has something to look forward to by sprinkling in active components like cookies to click or resources to gather idle games can keep players constantly occupied and engaged all through simple and intuitive mechanics the longing is this sort of design taken to its logical extreme instead of waiting for merely a few seconds minutes or hours the longing sees you waiting for days weeks and possibly even months for things to happen and all you've really got to do in the meantime is gather coal drawing supplies and crafting materials to make the shades weight more bearable and this is where one of the longings cleverest mechanics comes in the more comfortable you make the shades weird little house the faster time advances because they're less bored this means that not only is actually playing the game strictly optimal if you just want to get to the ending but it also gives you a bunch of great opportunities to get invested in the shade struggle with each new item of furniture you make and each seemingly insignificant goal you achieve the shades outlook on life improves and because you've spent so much time guiding them from room to room and waiting for doors to open these things feel great to accomplish and you can't help but get attached to the little monster as a result the game's use of loops also feeds into this effect because logging off in your room is strictly optimal each gameplay session plays out very similarly with you slowly exploring the same areas over and over this creates the opportunity not only for you to watch them change but also for previously scary and new areas to become comfortable and familiar over time this is also how your relationship with the shade evolves they're pathetic and off-putting at first but after spending enough time with them eventually you'll begin to empathize without the longing's glacial pace and its tactical use of boredom it would never be able to build up the anticipation required to make its milestones feel meaningful nor would you be able to build up a relationship with the shade as you'd be too focused getting from point a to point b when getting to the dark caves beyond the kingdom takes about two hours even something as pointless as meeting a new spider friend becomes this memorable moment and the knowledge in the back of your head that your time with the shade must one day come to an end makes those highlights all the more important this is where that big 400 day countdown timer comes in just like all timers it acts as a source of pressure but because it's so slow even when you've quit tumbled the speed time passes at home it never really influences your day-to-day actions what the timer does do is serve as an existential threat to you and the shade when that 400-day timer elapses the game is over and the shades duty will be complete this seems simple but with no way of knowing what will happen when the king wakes up and the fact that you helping the shade only makes the clocktick faster you may begin to doubt the old king as well as the initial premise of the game some reasonably mild spoilers for the longing here i won't go into any major detail about the end game but if you fancy playing the game for yourself you may want to skip ahead to this timestamp in effect the timer presents you with a moral choice rather than the game simply going into stasis when you close it time still progresses so choosing not to play is actually just the choice to consign the shade to their fate this forces the player to weigh up the pros and cons between making the shades sad life down in the caves as comfortable as possible or helping them escape helping the shade escape pretty much just ask you to do yet more waiting puzzles but because you invested in their struggle by this point even something so simple as making your way up a steep cliff or unpacking some vague riddles feels like a real moment of triumph that's the power of the longing's design as well as temporal mechanics in general even if the average playtime for the longing is somewhere in the region of 12 to 20 hours it's the perception of a 400 day game that drives us to either conquer or escape it even if you'll never actually devote anywhere near that amount of time to the game the longing doesn't need action-packed gameplay a bunch of different mechanics or a story full of twists and turns to motivate me to beat it not once but twice all it needs is an understanding of how to make the comparatively mundane engaging emotionally resonant and compelling enough to make me come back once the novelty had worn off the reason why the longing's use of time is so effective is because whilst you have a lot of it the end is inevitable and you can never go back this is the super important lesson i mentioned earlier when you get right down to it time itself is one of the great driving forces not just in getting us to play video games but also in our lives in general you as humans and i as an ageless super being only have so much time in the universe and so we're driven to use our limited schedule as best we can when we play games we can't help but try to take shortcuts over mountains optimize killing baddies as quickly as possible and see all the content the game has to offer as fast as we can because we only have so much time to play games and we want to make the most of it time limits and time loops are such effective motivators because they play on these real world impulses and fears we live constantly worried that we might not have enough time to do everything we want to and we wish we could replay elements of our lives to understand them better or change how they happened and video games allow us to explore those feelings in a way that's cathartic this need to use our limited time drives almost all of our decisions when you get right down to it success children wealth we have a deep longing for all these things because we only have a limited time to get them in note my use of the word longing this is what i think the game is all about we as gamers are often so eager to use our precious time as efficiently as possible that we sometimes don't use it meaningfully we waste hours grinding away at stuff we don't really enjoy because it will make other stuff we also don't enjoy happens slightly faster we pour hundreds of hours into 100 in games by doing all the boring filler side quests and we get manipulated into blowing money on sketchy free-to-play games to let us skip ahead robbing us of the satisfaction of a job well done instead i think it pays sometimes to just take a moment look past the flashy colors and mechanics designed to milk you of your endorphins and just slow things down and i'm aware of the irony of that coming from the immortal space being who speaks about 200 words a minute by taking our time and appreciating the experience of games as we play them taking in the details and the smaller moments that add so much to the texture of truly great titles we can enjoy the journey of playing that much more as well as make the all-important destination feel better too this is why it's so important to understand temporal mechanics limits loops and waiting can make great games even more compelling and turn understated titles like the longing into experiences that stick with you for a very long time however they can also be used to trick us into playing games we don't enjoy anymore or aren't just playing bad on that note next time you boot up a game i want you to think about why you're playing it are you genuinely enjoying yourself or just going through the motions are you appreciating the experience of playing a game or are you too fixated on optimizing your play to really enjoy it and of course are you spending your limited time wisely or are you just watching dumb youtube video [Music] you know what forget that one you're good keep watching in fact let's loop around again shall we yeah welcome back the longing is a game that takes 400 days to play hey hey hey and welcome to that bit at the end of every video where i talk about things that aren't in the video yeah whatever anyway i want to plug grace lee and her channel what's so great about that which i just found and is pretty great itself i was not expecting to enjoy a leftist reading of untitled goose game and the nature of taking back power quite as much as i did please check it out as well as the rest of her channel if on the other hand you fancy supporting my continuing nonsense then you might want to consider pitching in on patreon where you'll get updates sneak peeks as well as a little special thing from the architect archives coming alongside the next video so stay tuned for that my increasingly large group of top tier mysterious benefactors also get a free shout out at the end of each video and they are alex delaunch assaran al-sakav baxter heal big chess bodhi bran lab briana zariani constantinapunct daniel metchez david sester dirk jan karenbeld doodlehog evie elliot godzich philip magnus george sears greta hamerson items to astound on dm's guild uh okay sure whatever janos vaquete jordan joshua binswagger kai gillespie lee berman lucas slack lunar eagle 1996 mace window 54 max philippov knox patrick romberg philby the bilby prospero rey's dad samuel vanderplatz sheldon hearn steve riley strategy in ultima and chow thank you for all your support it is an honor to be able to do this for a living and i will see you soon bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 4,595,331

Rating: 4.9242134 out of 5

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, Longest Games, Shortest Games, Incremental Games, Time Travel, Time Loops, Spelunky, Adventure Capitalist, The Longing, Pikmin, Overwatch, Grinding, Ending, Outer Wilds, The Outer Wilds, Time Limit, Speedrunning, Speedrun

Id: yRkYJJtW-hI

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Darkvoidx]

Picked this game up during the summer sale and haven't had the chance to jump in yet. Does this video have any spoilers to speak of?

[u/ivoridd]

I actually just saw what happens after 400 days in my own copy of the game this week. This video helped me realize why a game like Elder Scrolls Online bothers me with its wait times where games like Old School Runescape and The Longing don't.

With the latter two, you can actively make an effort every day to lower the wait time along with becoming familiar with the game. In ESO, you have to wait 20 hours to upgrade your horse or pay real money. You have to wait over two months at least to research traits. The wait's just there to keep you coming back, and there's nothing you can do to shorten that time in-game (without paying real money, at least).

I guess I'd never really given it much thought before beyond general feelings, I'm glad to have seen this.

[u/Sand_Coffin]

I like these kind of video game-based video essays. I've found I'm not always stellar at realizing WHY I feel certain ways about different mechanics or features, and a lot of these videos help me conceptualize those emotions surprisingly well.

My personal favorite is Game Makers Toolkit. Here's a video of his on keeping players engaged during games.

I just love this nonsense. Thanks OP for sharing this one!

[u/vaGnomeMagician]

A streamer named Tomato used this game as his outro for the last year, he JUST finished the game. The game is definitely interesting.

[u/MysteriaDeVenn]

I really like this video and how he explains the different ways how time is used in games. I just realized that a lot of games that I’m not interested in, abandoned mid-way, or where I either hated part of the mechanics or completely ignored part of them, are in fact using time-based mechanics.

[u/OriginsOfSymmetry]

Just a heads up if you aren't aware or if it wasn't clear that this game can be finished in a lot shorter than 400 days. The timer you get is more or less a maximum and there are other endings you can get. With that said some pathways (as well as other things) will become available as time passes. I picked up the game the 10th of July and have completed it.

[u/Mikejamese]

I don't know, I'm all for experimentation with creative uses of things like time mechanics, time limits, and/or having the world of the game change over time, but things like artificially padding out the run-time by making your character move at a snail's pace for the entire game just sounds frustrating.

[u/sliderthief]

Just plugging a little freeware game called VESPER.5 from a few years back that takes about 100 days to finish. It only takes a minute per day. I won't say more and just recommend that you go in blind.

[u/Saleriy]

I wish there were more games like The Outer Wilds and Majora's Mask, where you play in a Time Loop and are expected to learn schedules and observe how things change over time to progress.