2.0 hours played
Written 19 days ago
TL;DR: While We Wait Here is a game with some interesting concepts at its core that are squandered by it's odd writing, subpar voice acting, and annoying technical issues.
~~ This review does not contain spoilers ~~
I'll begin with the positives. I actually think that the game's story is good! There's a lot of interesting ideas at play, fascinating moral questions, fun (on paper) character interactions, and solid hooks. The themes of honesty and responsibility resonate throughout the game, with it leaving the way in which these themes are executed in your hands. I won't elaborate on the moral questions for spoiler reasons, but they're fairly obvious to anyone who's played the game. Some of the characters have compelling relationships, though these are sadly wasted, as we'll soon see. Finally, I think the game sets up questions surrounding the 'real'-ness of what's going on and its connected mysteries well.
However, all of this is bungled in the execution. The dialogue and story events feel very... functional? It feels like the writers made an excellent storyboard, constructed a clear, coherent narrative, and then simply lacked the tact to see it through. A lot of the dialogue is stilted and utilitarian, very clearly conveying information to the player, but being boring and, at times, cringe to listen to. All of it serves to keep the story going, and I certainly can't say the writers waste your time, but in ensuring each line conveys something useful, they forgot to make the dialogue sound like something a human would say. This austere method of storytelling extends to the events of the narrative, too, with characters doing things that perfectly suit the story being told, but seem rash, sudden, and needlessly dramatic. If the story was to slow down and allow the characters time to settle into their dialogue and arcs, it would've been a much more compelling narrative. Instead, I often found myself either bored or frustrated by the flat dialogue and confused by the erratic behaviour of the cast.
The issues with the dialogue are only worsened by the voice acting. However, I'm not sure if this was a failing of the actors or of whoever was directing them. Virtually every VA overacts their dialogue, with everything from the most off-hand quip to the large, dramatic moments, sounding like it's serious, groundbreaking information. This made the more relaxed scenes feel dissonant and heavily reduced the impact of actually shocking sequences.
Finally, the graphics requirements for this game are simply absurd. I have a solid PC, yet this game was apparently too powerful for my GPU. Having both played the game on heavily reduced settings and seen gameplay from people with beefier PCs, this simply makes no sense. It looks like a PS2 game and can literally run on a Nintendo Switch; there is no reason for the game to be so demanding of your GPU.
Essentially, While We Wait Here is a good story that's told poorly. If the writers had given the characters more time to flesh themselves out and weren't so focused on ensuring the game kept it's mile-per-minute momentum, it'd be a much better experience. Moreover, these failings in the writing are accentuated by the poor voice acting on display. Whether from over-enthusiastic VAs or from inadequate direction, every line is delivered with a dramatic gravitas that makes most scenes seem bizarre whilst robbing the story's most climactic moments of their significance. Finally, it's just unnecessarily hard on your computer. There's no reason for the high graphical requirements beyond that the game's simply unoptimised. For these reasons, I simply can't recommend While We Wait Here.
