‘The Stillness of the Wind’: lonely, frustrating, and beautiful

While browsing recent sales on the Nintendo Switch E-Shop, I came across 2019 farming game The Stillness of the Wind. With a list of similar simulators on the Switch library that’s only growing, this short indie title stands out in the popular genre with its meaningful reflections on life. The tagline on the Switch product page sets the tone for its meditative atmosphere – “a quiet game of life and loss”.

You play as Talma, a grandmother left alone to maintain her once-bustling family farm as her relatives have all left for city life. The game has several features typical to farming simulators – you tend to animals, plant crops and make products. Sunny tones and simple shapes of the art style convey the warm idealism of this peaceful life. But each day the sun inevitably sets, the gentle music fades out and Talma is left to slowly perform her tasks in an all-encompassing darkness. A bleak image from the trailer shows her standing solemnly at a grave. The publisher description of the game includes a note that Talma is “approaching the end of her days”. As the witness to these final days, the player must face this, too. Only something is off. Talma receives “increasingly disturbing” letters from her family. It’s an unnerving mystery that keeps the player looking forward to the next day, and sets a jarring contrast between city goings-on and their invasion onto her remote farming life.

The controls of the game operate via a point-and-click approach that can be fairly clunky. This is especially true when trying to interact with objects, which is a key part of the gameplay and so rather frustrating. Players will quickly become accustomed to all the activities they can do because of their rather limited range, although hardly any guidance is given. You have total freedom to play as you like, setting the ground for lots of confused guesswork. Talma can interact with objects and landmarks to reflect on her childhood, and you are encouraged to indulge curiosity and wander out into the desert. The image of the lone, old woman navigating her way through the emptiness is a blunt one. Yet it’s an emptiness that she is familiar with every day. The solitude is broken by the visits of a local tradesman, always announced by a somewhat eerie music-box sound of his jangling wares. As the only other person to actually talk to, I came to anticipate his news and joking conversations as much as Talma herself might. Although it wasn’t always this way.

As told in the game’s introductory words, there was “a time when sixteen shoes waited by the door every morning”. The writing of the game is deeply personal and intimate. In many life simulators the player is customisable, entirely mute apart from some dialogue choices, or not seen at all due to first-person perspective. But in The Stillness of the Wind it is not left up to the player to entirely imagine the player character’s personality or personal history. Talma’s recollections tell the player what was what, and the richness of the memories that she and the letters reference is clear.

Out in the desert, the player can find collectible statues with short dialogue from significant memories of Talma’s life. As you approach the statues, children’s laughter and conversation plays. It is both out of place and warmly nostalgic, even from the player’s outside perspective. When the text has been read, these sounds suddenly and harshly disappear, leaving behind only the soft music of the game. Moments like this demonstrate that while straight-forward, The Stillness of the Wind is full of subtlety and depth. Though alone with her memories, Talma still whistles as she works or laughs brightly as she tends to her animals. The soundscape, like the gameplay, is fairly repetitive in its limitation. However, even that complaint speaks to how the game shows the nature of her life. Many simulators contain repetitive gameplay, but few ask you to consider the lived realities of a life like this – or what it is to empathise with another person’s. Of course, you can play this game to unwind, but I found it impossible not to become emotionally invested in all that The Stillness of the Wind showed, as well as all that it did not.

The game also features nightmares with stark images like still, zombie-like people or a vast graveyard, set to the incredibly loud sounds of a train. They are somewhat nonsensical and always ominous, leaving the player troubled and confused. Similarly, on some days, the tradesman will warn of approaching wolves. Talma owns a shotgun and can trade produce for bullets in order to protect her goats when they come. Their haunting howls can be heard before they attack, with ghostly glowing eyes helping the player to see their looming figures in the darkness. Sometimes shooting at the wolves is successful and sometimes it is not, because they can move fast. If I’m honest I don’t know whether it was up to my poor aim or if the goats were always supposed to be killed, leaving me frustrated and aggrieved – and each time Talma laughs once less during the next day’s tasks.

Ordinarily, the farming simulator has the player work towards the goal of creating a farm that is efficient and produces lots of profit. In Stardew Valley, for instance, each day is approximately 14 minutes in real time. A common player experience finds you rushing to complete as much work in the day as possible. The Stillness of the Wind, however, subverts this entirely. Talma moves slowly and, depending on your patience, perhaps painfully so. As the days progress, it becomes harder to do everything. Talma needs to eat to do any of the farming activities at all, needs products to trade with the salesman who comes almost every day, needs to keep her goats alive – and more and more it becomes too much to handle. The days become shorter but, of course, Talma does not become any faster. The weather has been bad before, but now it does not stop, becoming more like her nightmares. Winter comes in harsh and fast, and it becomes impossible to continue making produce as the land dies around you. The bright, beautiful game is now dark and foreboding, with the apocalyptic weather a sense that not just Talma’s days are coming to a close, but everything.

There is a level of emotional engagement that The Stillness of the Wind asks for in a way that other games of the farming genre do not. For these other games, the feeling associated with them might be more closely linked to the overall relaxing atmosphere. Here the brief window into a life, shown in a few hours’ worth of gameplay, asks you to face what is difficult. It maximises on the inevitable nature of how a story that is being told will always reach its end, however bleak, and the attachment to it that the interactive format of videogames provides. The reach of the game is ambitious for something so short, but certainly not without fault for its forcibly slow and repetitive gameplay. I played it in one sitting and I admit that the frustration would not encourage a return for some who might not be so willing to stick with it. These features don’t cause the game to entirely miss the mark it was trying to hit, however. To step into Talma’s shoes is an evocative player experience that I would love to revisit in the future, and see how my thoughts on the topics it attempts to challenge have changed.