The Stillness of the Wind

If you love stories, you'll probably dig this game. If for you, story is always a dressing for the gameplay, you should move on. The story being told here is about the human condition and more specifically, where it ends. It is beautiful, but it is also depressing. It explores the mundane aspects of everyday life (here, you are farming for subsistence), isolation, family and decline. If you want to feel like you are creating something meaningful and enduring in an utilitarian sense, this is definitely not the game for you. This is one of the games that best utilizes its medium as an interactive game to drive home the point it is trying to make. You watch a movie and you are somewhat passively invested. You play this character's life for a couple of hours, actively help her live her mundane life to the best of her ability and the ending hits you harder. What you do in this game is ultimately futile. You should still do it if you want to get everything you can from this experience and be impacted at the end. There is some story being told about the game world there. Bits and pieces that are impossible to assemble in a coherent whole. The background story is blurry and it is meant to be. The focus here is really on this character's life, her family and how the events of her world impact her. Its like having a magnifying glass on that character with everything around being blurry and out of focus. Don't expect some epic world building. This is a tale of introspection. As previously indicated, the gameplay there is is relatively mundane. You are living this person's life of subsistence on a farm. Her relationship with her family is explored through letters. The atmosphere, variety of things you can do, the fact that you need to eat, fend of wolves and the trading dynamics with the merchant makes it somewhat engaging for a couple of hours, but its a good thing that this game is less than 10 hours long. The payload is the story. A worthwhile experience in my opinion.

The first time I started the game, I couldn’t stop playing. I was like “One more day, one more letter, let’s water the plants one more time”! So much so, that on the next day I bought the first in the series ("Where the goats are") by the same developer (Memory of God) from itchio. I played both games twice. In “The Stillness of the Wind” we take the role of an elderly woman named Talma, as she passes her life day by day, tending to her small garden and few chicken and goats, fending off wolves, gathering plants from the area around her farm, and also trades with a passing salesman, who also happens to serve as a mailman. From the letters sent to us we learn how fare other members of her family, who had left for the big city. The letters become grimmer day by day, as we learn about a strange situation in the big city of the world, which doesn’t affect Talma directly at first, but it surely does mentally (and us, being sad with her). Beware that each day’s duration is very short (about 7 minutes each of the first days), which doesn’t allow for much to be done. You have to move fast. And as the days pass by, they become shorter (something that the mailman also points out to Talma) and Talma herself moves slower (as she grows older). But that’s OK, the game overall emerges very strong feelings, which compensate the player. If I could charge the game with a negative, it would be that it forces itself to end. I don’t want to spoil in what ways this is happening, you’ll get it when it starts happening. Of course it is not a survival game (i.e. about how long you will survive), it has a story to tell and it does that perfectly. About 4 hours for me. (The “Where the goats are” is simpler in gameplay mechanics and lasts exactly 1 h, as the developers state in the readme file.)

I bought this because I was specifically looking for something DIFFERENT for a change. I was not disappointed. If you can enjoy a game that is more about making a point or telling a story than 'winning' or 'gameplay mechanics' then you might enjoy this. Most of the story is told through her correspondence with her relatives. I don't want to say anything more about that because I don't want to ruin the story for people, but I will say that it got me in my FEELS at the end. I finished it in about 3.5 hours.

This is a melancholy game, not mush about crafting and surviving as much as it is about gently watching things play out. You don't really influence the narrative other than reading letters, choosing how to run your farm, and finding how the same ending scene looks with some variation. It's meditative but not prescriptive, somber but not overdramatic. Sobering game not trying to really earn some big dramatic payoff. Also cheese.