Rating
Waking
Combining third-person action and guided meditation, Waking is an emotional adventure through your dying mind. Battle the forces of oblivion, conjure the memories of loved ones, and join them in the fight for your life.
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Waking Reviews
Professional reviews from gaming critics
Overall, I think that Waking is brilliantly well-thought out. It’s satisfying at times, beautiful at times, emotional at times, and it quickly roped me in to feeling passionately eager to resolve my mental problems and discover my fate. It is inevitably, somewhat repetitive because it gives you many, many hours of gameplay, but just doesn’t quite have the enemy diversity, or unique map specificity to keep up with that. As a player, I felt listened to by the game, and I repaid it with my attention and effort, and it DID pay off in the end. I recommend Waking to any player, of any skill-level, l...
Waking is a game that attempts to be two very different things, and for the most part, it succeeds quite well. If you’re willing to devote a little bit of time to learning its quirky systems, you’re in for a potentially rewarding experience. An experience which encourages you to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and go back into your memories.
Perhaps with a couple of in-depth quality-of-life updates, Waking can be something special. For now, the reality is its unique narrative is held back by some fundamental design oversights.
Waking is a fascinating experiment that tries, but ultimately fails, to combine two radically different ideas together. Less would certainly have been more here, as the clunky and overly confusing action parts get in the way of the interesting narrative and psychological aspects. While I was drawn in by the central conceit and the use of meditation, the end result is more likely to leave you in a coma than drag you into the light.
I’ve played quite a fair few video games that explore mental illness or death. Fractured Minds offers a realistic and unique way to experience death. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice allowed me to understand further what it’s like to live with psychosis. Hell, even upcoming game Spiritfarer explores these themes in an emotional and heartfelt way that has me excited. However, none have asked me to be okay with and acknowledge my inevitable demise more than recent indie game Waking. Bit ble...
Waking tries to be a very unique experience, but all it manages to do is be way too long, frustrating, and unintentionally hilarious
With video games becoming more and more prominent in society, many developers try to come up with new and inventive ways to entertain the masses. Sometimes a new idea will come out that revolutionizes the industry. Myst essentially invented the exploration/puzzle genre, Demon’s Souls showed us that punishingly hard gameplay can be thrilling, and then there’s the Castlevania and Metroid games that became so popular they created their own genre: the metroidvania. Waking, an ambitious projec...
Under no circumstances should you play Waking. If you want guided meditation, there are plenty of free apps for phones and videos on YouTube. If you want to play a Souls-like, there are plenty out there, including actual Souls games. If you need a game with psychic powers, Control is a lot of fun. But Waking does everything badly: its amateurish attempts at introspection, its poor combat, the tediously repetitious mission structure, the headache-inducing bloom effect, and aggravating puzzles add up to a miserable game I couldn’t bring myself to finish even though I reached the final level. Avo...
Waking is a surreal experience from tinyBuild that will have you drawing on memory. Here’s our review.