While Waiting challenges you to make your own fidgety fun as you puzzle through life's little pauses

rockpapershotgun.com:

What do you reach for when you're waiting in line at the supermarket, or waiting in a shop doorway for the rain to stop, or even while you're waiting for a game to finish downloading? I don't mean to assume, but let's face it, it's probably your phone, where some idle doomscrolling likely awaits you, or some other, time-wasting distraction that will help fill the dead air between one task and the next. Well, While Waiting is a game that delves into precisely this fundamental human question: what is the best thing to do while waiting for something else to happen? It's from the makers of the very good puzzle game Moncage, and its newly released Steam demo is a pure, fidgety brilliance.

There are ten scenarios available in the demo, taken from the game's eventual 100+ on release, and each one sees you take control of a young, double-chinned lad who must find ways to kill time before a variety of different events take place. Sticker rewards that correspond to cryptic notebook scribbles hint at possible things you could spend your time doing while you wait, say, for the bus to arrive, or the rain to stop, or for a toilet to become free, but as the Steam page notes, "doing nothing is the ultimate strategy", and there's an accompanying sticker for simply 'doing nothing' and, well, waiting it out.

There is nothing you can do to speed up the process of each level. Over the course of the 30-odd minutes it will take you to run through the demo from start to finish, you'll have to quite literally wait for each level to auto-complete itself before you can move on to the next - and that's partly the point developers Optillusion are trying to convey here. Merely waiting is a 100% legitimate way to play While Waiting. The clue's in the name, after all.

But I do also think that, secretly, the real message of While Waiting is about making the most of the time available to you. I mean, if I see a clue that says "Arcade in the window" while I'm huddled under a café awning waiting for