FirstWait vs DEFRAG_
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
FirstWait
Experience two unsettling scenarios: a home that turns sinister and a terrifying shared taxi ride. Survive eerie atmospheres and silent passengers until your escape.
- Two distinct haunting locations
- Unsettling atmosphere
- Survival gameplay
- Taxi escape scenario
- Eerie sound design
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You find yourself in two haunting locations that seem ordinary at first but quickly spiral into unsettling experiences. In the first, you're at your home, but something feels wrong. The familiar surroundings begin to shift, and distant angelic sounds echo through the air. As the eerie atmosphere thickens, you realize you’re not alone, and you must survive until your taxi arrives to take you away. The second location is the taxi you’ve just ordered, but there’s one catch – it’s a shared ride. What was meant to be a quick escape turns into a terrifying journey as you notice the weird passengers. They don’t speak. They only stare at you from the corners of your eyes, and the silence in the car feels suffocating. To make things worse, you receive a call from an old friend with some ‘news’ she just can’t wait to share. Can you survive and reach your destination?
DEFRAG_
A first-person horror game where you navigate a corrupted digital world by rendering its environment with text. Use your rasterizer to reveal paths, but be wary of sound-hunting creatures and limited memory.
- Procedural, seed-persistent world
- Sound-hunting creatures
- Runtime synthesized audio
- Endless descent gameplay
- Authentic CRT playback effects
- Text-based rendering
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Nothing here is lit. Everything must be drawn. DEFRAG is a first-person horror game rendered entirely in text. You are a recovery process inside a vast, corrupted console - a liminal megastructure of atriums, corridors, and holes where the floor should be. Your only tool is a handheld rasterizer: sweep it across a surface and the world resolves into a lattice of characters, exactly the same characters every time, because the text was always there. You are not lighting the dark. You are forcing it to render. Memory is life. Every glyph you draw spends dedicated memory. Run out, and the sector restarts. Reach each sector's amber gate with something left, and descend. You are the loudest thing here. The residents - low-poly, many-legged, geometrically wrong - hunt sound, not sight. Footsteps, bursts, the raster itself: everything you do tells them where you were. Bait them. Route around them. Hold one frozen in your beam while you back away. Sprint only when you must, because sprinting is the only thing faster than they are - and when one gets close, your own map begins to boil: characters scramble, tremble, and blush red as the corruption walks through your work. A different console every time - and the same one forever. Your world seed persists: every wall, every pit, every inscription is exactly where it was. Sectors grow larger, meaner, and more crowded without end. The music - a worn, detuned synthesizer loop generated from your seed - degrades into screaming static as death approaches. Every sound in the game, from the sub-bass rumble of the structure to the corrupted-modem calls of the residents, is synthesized live. There are no audio files, no textures, no models. Only text. - Procedural, seed-persistent world that renders only where you rasterize - Sound-hunting creatures that read your noise, not your position - All audio synthesized at runtime; score generated from your world seed - Endless descent with escalating scale and difficulty - Authentic IBM VGA typeface and full CRT playback: scanlines, barrel distortion, phosphor grain - Deaths: falling, holes, and geometry that made contact Photosensitivity note: DEFRAG uses CRT-style flicker and bursts of scrambling static.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: FirstWait at Free against DEFRAG_'s $4.99. FirstWait also leads on iOS requirement (13.0 vs 17.0). DEFRAG_'s advantage is ads (none vs shown). On rating, ratings volume, update cadence and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
FirstWait is free to download; DEFRAG_ costs $4.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for FirstWait against 5.0 for DEFRAG_. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 1 and 1 respectively.
FirstWait ships an update every 3 days, DEFRAG_ every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on September 27, 2026 and October 10, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | FirstWait | DEFRAG_ |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — better | $4.99 |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) |
| Number of ratings | 1 | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 days — better | Every 4 days |
| Ads | Yes | No — better |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Ad-supported — better | Paid |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, Mac |
| Requires iOS | 13.0 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 357 MB | 1 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 9+ |
| Developer | Ledian Ismalaj | Michael Gecawicz |
Customer experience
FirstWait
DEFRAG_
In-app purchases
FirstWait
No in-app purchases
DEFRAG_
No in-app purchases









