I really appreciate Stilstand as a piece of art. It's about an hour of hatched panels interrupted by small minigames like a Flappy Bird adaptation and it's about the depression, anxiety and loneliness of a woman in Copenhagen.

In a way, I can relate to this stasis, reducing life to few controllable rituals, whilst outside is like a torrent passing by too quickly to keep up. In general it's probably something that needs to be addressed, as it's happening everywhere around us and it's challenging for the affected to escape that maelstrom.

The bitter taste left by Stilstand though is, that involvement of the player is rather an excuse, as there's no difference to the animation or story, if you click a single highlighted area or anywhere else to proceed, if you move the arm to drink and smoke or let it just happen or if you start with one or another of three outfits, when you go through all of them anyway.
I couldn't make any change by picking other dialogue options as well. Stilstand always ends up the same.

Now, it's possible that it's quite a reasonable representation of helplessness with depressed people, as they're not just sad and can't just cheer up, like some might like them to. Maybe just like with the visual novel Lydia the rudimentary interaction is rather meant to integrate the player emotionally than keeping you awake. Stilstand will sure keep you up with ruminative thoughts.

I'm just not sure the game brought me any further. It's literally Stilstand. I didn't learn much from it, that I didn't know and there was no positive release or advice to work from. As a depiction of the problem Stilstand might actually be insightful to the uninitiated and maybe for some it's a nice signal they're not alone or they might be able to paraphrase shown symptoms to break their circle, but if not offering more interactive perspectives like in One Night Stand for instance, I would at least have expected a little encouragement.

It's possible I'm mixing up artist and artisan, because as a work of art in its sheer existence Stilstand is not in question. But on a gaming platform, like the Nintendo Switch in my case, a program should also be measured by its functionality.

SEVEN ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ STAR GAME


it’s perfect 🤍 we get 3 chapters from a graphic novel video game that looks into someone’s crippling depression. Feelings of being depleted & anxiety are portrayed, to great effect, by the tone evoked by the pencil strokes of the game’s author/artist, Ida. A success of the team that brought Ida’s drawings to life is how cleverly the game’s UI elements are seamlessly integrated into the panels of comic art. The mechanics of the game are intuitive. Advancing through the chapters is graceful, compared to the visual novel “gameplay” of the monotony of repeatedly clicking the same button to advance a game’s story. I haven’t played many games on this small scale that impress by how polished they are.

You can feel the love and angst that went into making this.

I’m glad that people who are able to relate to the themes of ‘Stilstand’ will be reminded that they are not alone in their struggles.