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 a Diary Of The Longing and, 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!”
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 that just 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: Apparently, The Longing is based on a real-life German legend, too, the Kyffhäuser 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 of Project 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 it on Steam right now for £13/€15/$15.
