While We Wait Here

About While We Wait Here

While We Wait Here is a first-person game from Bad Vices Games, released on October 23, 2024 on Windows and Mac through Steam and GOG, and on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox and Switch (on Xbox it is published by Troglobytes Games). Its makers describe it as a kitchen management game with dialogue choices and multiple endings, and as a psycho-horror.

You run a small diner near a mountain range. It starts as an ordinary working day: take orders, look up the dish in the recipe book, grill burgers, fry eggs, flip pancakes, pour coffee, take the cash and wash the dishes. Then the news reports a coming catastrophe, and the end of the world hangs over everyone inside. Some of your customers play it down or refuse to believe it, caught up in their own problems. Others welcome it as a punishment for what they have done.

The cooking is light: reviewers note there is no timer and no way to ruin a dish, so serving a plate is mostly how a conversation starts. The heart of the game is the customers, among them a cowboy, an actress, a conspiracy theorist in a tinfoil hat, a family and two goth teenagers. Each has a backstory that you play through away from the counter, and some of these change how you play, one of them into a shooting section. At the end of each story you make a choice that decides whether that customer heads for shelter or stays at the diner to wait for the end.

The horror is not in a monster but in the waiting and in the people. The sky outside turns red and a storm gathers over the mountains while you listen. The rating boards note intense violence, blood and gore, sexual themes and strong language, and the makers warn of alcohol use as well. Every character is fully voiced in English, and in Catalan too. The look is grainy and low-poly, in the style of late-nineties 3D games.

A run takes about two to three hours, and the makers say there is no game over and no right or wrong answer, so it is built to be played again for the other endings. Reviews are mostly warm on Steam; GameLuster gave it 6 out of 10, liking the atmosphere and the voice acting but finding the choices few and the ending abrupt. It suits players who like story-led horror built on conversation and choice, in the line of games where you serve strangers and slowly learn what they are hiding.

How to play While We Wait Here

1. Start a new game and take your place behind the counter of the diner.
2. Take each customer's order and check the recipe book for how to make it.
3. Cook in first person: grill, fry and flip the food, then serve it with drinks.
4. Talk with your customers and pick your answers in the dialogue choices.
5. Try to convince them to run for shelter, or let them stay, and see which ending your choices lead to.
6. Play again with different answers to reach other endings.

Tips

• Listen to the whole of each customer's story before you answer; the choice at the end of their backstory decides what they do.
• There is no timer on the cooking and no game over, so take your time with the conversations.
• Keep the recipe book open when an order is new to you.
• It is fully voiced: play with sound on.
• Most achievements come on a first run; play again and choose differently for the other endings.

Questions