Waking

 Xbox One
Waking Image
Metascore
51

Mixed or average reviews - based on 4 Critic Reviews What's this?

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  • Summary: 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.

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1 out of 4
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 4
  3. Negative: 1 out of 4
  1. GamingTrend
    Jun 29, 2020
    75
    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, looking for a unique, emotional, and personal experience.
  2. Xbox Tavern
    Jun 23, 2020
    50
    Waking has almost convinced me that I’m not very good at reviewing games, because it is so difficult to convey what it’s about and how it plays. I’ve taken more time than I normally would thinking about this game and how I was going to explain and grade it. It’s definitely an unenviable, uncomfortable position that I find myself in because indie developers live or die by reviews. In the end I had to ask myself if I enjoyed playing it and the answer is that it wasn’t exactly fun, but it wasn’t exactly bad either because I got what Jason Oda was trying to do. The reality is though, if a developer creates a game meant to be personable, that’s a hard thing to nail down. It will only impact head-on with a sliver of players, and those on either side will like or dislike to varying degrees.
  3. TheXboxHub
    Jun 30, 2020
    50
    Ultimately, there is a deep sense of regret from playing Waking on Xbox One because I feel there is something brilliant and life-affirming underneath all that is presented. The meditative sections and use of your personal details are unique and something I enjoyed, and there are certainly some great ideas within. However, Waking will divide gamers, with some loving this intriguing premise and others being put off by the overly long, randomly generated areas.
  4. Finger Guns
    Aug 6, 2020
    30
    Rough visuals, clunky and repetitive combat and a narrative that spectacularly misses the emotional connections it attempts to evoke, Waking makes you want to do anything but.

User Reviews

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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 0 out of 1
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 1
  3. Negative: 0 out of 1
  1. Xbox_Alive
    Jun 28, 2020
    6
    Waking is a 3rd Person Adventure Game. You play as You. You are in a coma and are tasked with traveling through you own mind and piecingWaking is a 3rd Person Adventure Game. You play as You. You are in a coma and are tasked with traveling through you own mind and piecing yourself back together so you can wake from this coma. The game asks you a few questions about yourself, like your name and size. As the game moves along you are asked slightly deeper questions. The game uses these questions to name NPCs and enemies to tailor the experience to you. This is a novel idea, but dose little more than decorate the surface. There are four areas of your mind you must traverse. Each area felt the same skinned as a different environment. Everything you do costs neurons, and you can gather them from enemies. There is an issue where you wont be able to kill an enemy because you're put of neruons, but you need to kill the enemy to get neurons. The game also randomizes each level so if you die, everythig you learned about the level has to be re-learned. The missions are all the same, causing the game to start to feel stale long before the 20 hours of play the game boasts. The story is engaging for the most part, but becomes lost to the repetitive nature of the gameplay. Visually Waking is lost, the imagery is stunning, but the blurring effect detracts from it. The final stage left me unable to figure out the chain of events I needed to unfold to finish within the five minute constraint your given, not to mention the layout shifts everytime you die. More could have been done to keep this game engaging.… Expand