The game is a facade, beneath is a truly great work of artistic intent. I'll explain, but play the game. Bring all your assumptions with you. I'll spoil below.

First I want to say, what I want to detail below is just what I appreciated most. The game has many intricate and fascinating aspects that deserve deeper analysis to appreciate, but this I feel is it's best accomplishment.

You've seen this story before, or its themes and archetypes. A lonely old man/woman going about routines. They have but one link to the outside world. This link brings them news of an abstract outside realm, which ticks on without you, but as the routine of daily life flows on, things begin to change. The world darkens, the routine breaks, the link severs, and the story ends. It's the typical allegory for old age and seniority, of being in the last year of life, and running down the clock. It's not revolutionary, it's not new, and if this game had nothing else beneath that veneer of indie game tropes it'd meld silently with all the others.

But then, the presence of mechanics typical to your farming simulator strengthen its message. Make cheese, buy goats, buy chickens, farm plants. The game's start deliberately tricks you, and you settle into a routine all of your own making. The elements of expanding your gains, the typical chill farming game experience, are present at a very surface level. You fall into the game play cycle.

Buy extra chickens = more eggs to sell = more goats to buy = more milk = more cheese = more hay = more milk = more seeds to plant = more and more and more

Nothing better demonstrates the ludo-narrative elements than the moment you pick up your hoe and rows and rows of potential plant spots pop up. The immediate reaction to a farming simulator veteran is of course "Now I shall fill up these many many plots with my thriving vegetable industry." As your grandma plods from the well to the veggies to water them, you begin formulating the plan. "A full watering can equals 5 waters, until I buy an upgrade I assume, which I can do quickly if I keep buying hay to make cheese if I have 3 goats, and soon I'll be buying seeds in bulk I'm sure." These expectations make the ending that much more bitter.

Just as you get into the swing, and you are piling up cheese and eggs and veggies in your larder, buying trinkets and awaiting the moment this game begins really expanding, it does the exact opposite. You take note that, right in the middle of making cheese, night falls. Odd you may think, that seemed fast. You barely manage to get everything you wanted to get done before it gets too dark to see. Then the next day the sun falls just as you're picking up the water can. Then you notice the trader is coming earlier and earlier and some days not at all. The days are getting shorter, and the constriction of time means you'll barely have time to get eggs and milk before the trader comes, and god knows you need the damn hay if he has it even. By the end of the first act you feel there's too much to do and not nearly enough time, and then the game clears up this issue for you.

Then wolves, in a great pack, come out and frankly you'll be lucky to save one goat. The chickens vanish, and with them a source of eggs. But it's okay there's plenty of cheese stored up, until with little fanfare they turn black on the shelves. Then the hay goes dark and rotten and the goat starves. A toxic rain kills the plants just after the well runs dry. The game spends it's first act promising growth, presenting the facade of your typical farming game, and then slowly ruins every last one of them. The mid game becomes practically claustrophobic as dark tidings and death seep in from all around you.

Soon you'll find there's little reason to walk out of your house other than stand by your mailbox and hope the trader comes by to hand you the next letter, which you already know may be the final correspondence. By this time the old woman barely makes it to the fence by midday, laden with the weight of age she gets slower and slower almost to further exacerbate the speed of time. But it's fine now, you realize. The plants have died, the chickens gone, the hay is rotten, and there's nothing left to do. There's no reason to plan ahead. It's oddly freeing, to know that now that everything has either rotted or died, that all that's left is to watch the world end.

I cannot emphasize enough how well this game turns a standard game-play formula against the player, and does so with such a slow, poisonous malice that sneaks its way to your heart. It's bleak, bittersweet ending so married to its mechanics makes it a truly awesome work in my eyes, and one that belies it's appearance of simplicity with a nuanced relationship to player expectations and indie game tropes. For any of its flaws and problems, this alone makes it feel totally complete, and I am grateful to have experienced it.

People say this game has a "slow burn". What they don't seem to realize is how that describes the narrative perfectly.

The Stillness of the Wind is a soulful depiction of domesticity and farm life. Taking on the form of an elderly woman, Talma, I leisurely milked goats, gathered eggs, and tended to my garden for 3 blissful hours. I bartered fresh cheese for books, flower seeds, a lantern, and...

Then the wolves came, and they killed my goat. And my cheese rotted. My plants died, my other goats starved, and the well was dry. I had no firewood. I had no food.

I had strange and uncomfortable dreams, and the letters I received from my distant family got stranger and stranger.

I began to lose my memory.

And then I died .

As someone watching my grandparents in their old age (who have a similar lifestyle) this hits home. Hard.

It's true, this game is slow -- plodding, even. It's depressing. It doesn't have traditional gameplay. But it's honest. It's a humble and raw depiction of what it's like to keep living in relative solitude while the world changes around you. In sum: a beautifully-crafted, painfully-inward look towards old age and memory with a futuristic, pastoral backdrop.

The apocalypse doesn't always end with a bang or a whimper. Sometimes it ends with a sad old woman holding tight to routine, and a world as tired as she is.

Slow burn.

I rarely, ever, write a review for a game.
This is something else though.
This isn't a game.
It's a poetic existential experience.

If you allow yourself to be sucked in.
Which you will need to consciously do.
Then you will find something here.
Something very special.
You will not find anywhere else.

This was incredibly depressing and much more dark than I thought. I saw some reviews online that described this game as "relaxing", it's not.

At first I liked taking care of the goats and garden, I didn't mind that it was slow (even if it is really, really, really slow), but after a while every minute started to feel like ages. After 2 hours I had lost all the will to do anything, all my goats and chickens had died despite all my efforts to prevent it and I spent the last days just sitting in the chair doing nothing and praying for the game to end. I couldn't bear it anymore, and maybe that was the point? Then the ending made me feel even worse.

I liked the art and concept but it's incredibly tedious and playing it made me feel awful.
I don't recommend it especially to people suffering from depression and/or anxiety.

Read this before you buy!

This is not a survival game. It is masked as one, but is far from it and you will realise that after you invested too much time to quit. I even have no idea why I played it through the end.
This is not a game, this is "story experience", so be ready for that.
This is not relaxing experience, it is dark, gloomy and on occasions very stresfull.

I have mixed feelings about it. I sure believe there should be these kind of games: it is different, unusual, emotional.
On the other hand if I ask myself did I have fun, the answer is 'no'. And I will give it a positive review to support the devs, but this might as well be a negative review too.

It will probably be interesting to you if you like serious literature or some heavy read exploring deep dark depressing emotions about life (or such).

For those who didn't enjoy the game, they wanted to build a super farm--not play a game with a story plot that so happens to take place on a farm. If you're like me, who doesn't enjoy farming simulators, but still likes completing tasks and has a strange unlimited amount of patience when it comes to games, then this is the game. Also, if you like to grow attached to your character and then get quite a catharsis when you finish a game, then this game is DEFINITELY for you. A run down of the summary of the game and what you can do:

As Talma, you receive letters and go about your days tending to your small farm. Pay attention to the letters, that's where the story lies. You'll learn about her childhood past and current relations, along with trying to go about each day with little joys. Such as petting the goats, drawing in the sand, and growing flowers,

Speculative lore of: "A quiet game of life and loss. One by one, everyone left the village for the city. Everyone, except Talma. Approaching her final years, she maintains a simple way of life tending to her homestead, surviving, subsisting, whilst increasingly disturbing letters arrive from her family in the city."

The key words in the summary of the game "her final years" are your biggest clue what to expect of this game. I don't know how people missed it, or why they were surprised that this is not a regular farming simulator game. This game is designed to make you think about life, loss, longing, and leaving. Also, pay mind to the fact Talma is an old woman. You will do the work slow, eat slow, and walk slow--just enough to irritate you but not enough for you to give up on completing whatever you have in mind to do for that day.

The second large clue that should've stopped farming simulator extrordinairres from playing this: "increasingly disturbing letters arrive." (Is there really any farming simulator that is disturbing?) Notice, we do not begin with disturbing letters, but later on receive them as the game progresses. Why are they disturbing? Is it disturbing Talma? Worrying her? Creating a desire to leave? Creating a desire for her family to come back home? Honestly, I can't spoil these questions because the unique thing about this is we grow learning about Talma through letters, and her actions. She reminisces about the past at times, but for the most part--by the end of the game you don't really learn about Talma on deeper personal level to answer these questions. UNLESS, you collect the crumbs of information from the days, dreams, nights, and her family's perceptions of her (think about how they write to her, even in the disturbing letters you get an idea of Talma's personality and how she treats others).

This game is thankfully not in real time, so the days pass fast. The con of this: you can't do everything you want to in one day. Also, Talma WILL get exhausted if you don't eat before bedtime. This isn't a spoiler, just a warning that if you think "the games frozen/broken/lagging" when this happens--no. Talma is an old woman and needs her rest you monster. >:( Give her some cheese.

My final comment: I'd describe this game with a honey trap plot that leaves you truly silent at the end.

You are old, and you are alone, but there is joy in the simple life of a farmer. You can laugh at the simple things. But then you find memories, buried in the desert, and the letters from home turn frightening, and your loved ones slowly stop writing. You have nightmares. The laughter and songs stop coming. The wolves come at night. The birds disappear, even from a locked coop. The flowers die. The cheese rots in the storeroom. And then the storms come.

I am scared, and I am alone, and the days are going by too fast for me, faster than they should.

This is a beautiful game about sadness and loss and the inevitability of age and death. But it is done so softly, so quietly, that the ache had settled into my heart before I even realised it.

This game will emotionally wreck you. I didn't cry like other reviewers but my soul feels obliterated and my heart is crushed. I went into this game thinking that it was like most of the other cozy
games... THIS IS NOT A WARM, EMOTIONAL COZY GAME. This game is emotional but in the sense that you want to absolutely feel dread and despair. This game is very dark, and it will rip your heart out. I have so much existential dread and honestly, I believe that's what the developers were going for.

This game has a very slow pace. There's a few things to do in each day but you quickly become accustomed to your own routine on the farm, as the game progresses you become less and less energetic, doing less and less of your chores. I wasn't sure about the pacing of this game at first but it honestly is so creative and smart from the developers to have the move function this way as it encapsulates the elderly experience of moving slower as your days change. Brilliant move honestly and extremely profound.

You truly become attached to Talma and see how it is to be old once your kids have left and you are left by yourself. The game is eerie, it is unsettling and it is gripping.Piecing the story together from the progressively dark letters from your family followed by the ending is the most gut punching thing I have ever experienced from a game.

I would absolutely recommend someone play this if you like dark games with deep meanings. I have pretty bad anxiety and while this game never triggered my anxiety in a massive way, I definitely felt more anxious and intrigued as the game progressed. I'll leave this review with a final note that I'm sure other players will agree with: I'm going to go tell my parents and my grandmother I love them and that I should probably visit home more often.

Well, that was depressing.

I honestly don't know how to feel about the game, since it does leave something to be desired.

1. You really want to tend to your farm and explore your surroundings as much as you can, but it's frustrating how arbitrary the length of the day is. On the other hand, it's obvious this is done on purpose to show Nana's age and frailty.

2. You want to read all the letters and piece together what is happening to your family who left you for the big city, but you can't focus on it, because there's little time.

3. There's a crippling fear that you'll lose your livestock, crops, etc, until you realize the game will inevitably take it all no matter how hard you try.

So, if you want to understand the story through reading letters, gathering collectible items and visiting Nana's memorable locations around the farm, you run the risk of neglecting your farm (results in either missing the NPC when he comes around, or not making enough produce for trading with him, which is also important for the story). And if you want to tend to your farm, make produce and trade, you can miss the story hints hidden around the stead, which give a more clear understanding of Nana and her family. So I think this game might require two or three runs to fully understand.

Other than that, it has some kind of hypnotizing way of pulling you in with its simple, mundane daily life cycle.

I still have no clue how to feel about this depressing farming sim. But I don't regret the time spent.

You'll either love it or hate it.

It's a tough sell in the sense it's not a game where your choices will impact the ending but it's more about appreciating the journey to the inevitable outcome. Will it resonate with you? impossible to tell, but if it does you'll get something out of it. Adults can probably relate better to some of the themes it throws around. Best to play it in one session (about 2-3hrs). Certainly it helps to be in the right mood for playing this game, as it is a slow game and is repetitious in the daily tasks.

There's not enough time in the day to do all the required tasks or explore the areas. Making the hard choices of what to sacrifice along the way to try and sustain Talma as she tries to survive is pretty bleak and depressing, but it's the glue which holds it all together. It's different but I wouldn't call it fun. It did provoke a few thoughts and feelings in me that I wasn't expecting. I enjoyed the one play through by all means, but have no real desire to go through it again.