There is no way to torch this game without going into spoilers, sorry

The Stillness of the Wind is garbage, the kind of pretentious crap that could only come from the indie scene. Oh yes, I know it's more popular to rag on AAA games, to lambast big devs for their “soulless” products- believe me, two hours of this trash and you’ll be begging for the next Anthem. On all the fundamentals, let me repeat, on ALL the fundamentals it fails, doling out slop in a vain attempt at producing art. Such a title represents the worst aspects of the independent market and should be AVOIDED in every sense of the word.

I’ll briefly talk about the positives because, yes, they do exist, and I’d rather get them out of the way before tearing their progenitor apart. Visually, we’ve got another one of those plain art styles that actually works quite well here. You spend your entire playthrough on a farm laden with primary colours which successfully evoke that pastoral, rural feel Lambic Studios was evidently going for: objects are rendered in simple shapes, interiors look homely, and a gentle breeze swings through the land. Various filters are applied to simulate such dynamic events as diurnal cycles and tropospheric weather, and while the latter do make the screen a bit too visibly aberrated, the effect ultimately serves its purpose. On the aural side, Stillness boasts a surprising amount of onomatopoeia for the few animals you manage- it’ll eventually get repetitive, but at least effort was made for a feature otherwise overlooked in most games of this genre.

Aaaaaaaaaaand, that’s about all the pros. Let’s begin the drubbing with a couple of lighter jabs to the afore-discussed departments, starting with the lack of ground texturing. Zero effort has been put into making this land look arable, the smooth yellow surfaces resembling a giant desert than anything else. I get they were hearkening back to the original Harvest Moon, which also flaunted a mustard acreage, but there you could at least tell the terrain was soil; here, unless you whack the dirt with your hoe, you’re going to be witnessing sandy beaches galore. Secondly, a weird patchwork scheme has been implemented for a select number of exteriors; I suppose it’s okay for rooftops and textiles, however, when you see sheep decked with the same motif, it can’t help but seem bizarre. Lastly, character models are pretty misshapen; I couldn’t tell hair apart from clothing, and faces are literally just empty circles.

SFX is pretty uninspired as a whole, coming across like run-of-the-mill acoustic files someone stumbled upon in an audio library. The few music compositions you hear are fine yet unmemorable, akin to rejected tracks from Little House on the Prairie. Voice acting is either grunts or whistles, the latter of which is pretty blatantly done by a male for your female protagonist Talma.

Nonetheless, all of these are trivial criticisms spiritually present in other games- no, the real source of my hatred lies in the story and gameplay. See, Stillness wants to be this deep, morose tale about the winds of change, about how dreams collapse against the realities of society and the fallout that has on an older person. It depicts this through an anecdotal yarn wherein Talma receives letters from her friends and family who, prior to the start of the game, left for greener pastures, and who are now writing back about their declining status. Pure text-based narratives have been effective in past releases like “Papers, Please”, so this wasn’t an inherently bad tactic, but where Stillness goes wrong is in how nonsensical its world is. You’ll hear about things like people traveling to space colonies or children disappearing/reappearing ala The 4400, and you consequently never get a sense of what this place is like. It’s clearly not a metaphorical representation of any locale in our realm of existence, and it clearly has supernatural qualities, so how am I, as an average joe, supposed to empathize with whatever obstacles Talma’s kin are facing? Can I really understand the yearnings of an unruly child if aliens can abduct her at a moment’s notice? Should I really care if my cousin’s business is falling apart when a flip in circumstances is just around the corner? The lack of natural rules destroys any kind of foundation sympathy could have arisen from because you are simply unable to comprehend why things are happening the way they are. And for a game that’s clearly trying to evoke a vintage feel with its agrarian aesthetics, these futuristic elements seem extra out-of-place.

Then again, there’s a good chance I’m flat-out misinterpreting everything as the writing is F&CK-ING terrible. Seriously, every single epistle is written like a first-year Literature Major’s essay, chock-full of elongated paragraphs and flowery prose that obscure what should have been direct messages. They’re confusing, hifalutin, and utterly forgettable. For all the crude stuff that’s happening, Talma’s family somehow finds the time to scribe these pompous missives that make them seem like high-brow caricatures. Not once did I ever believe I was reading about a real person with real problems, which ruined any immersion Lambic was attempting to educe in players. What’s worse is their scripticians couldn’t even be bothered to type-up a SINGLE response from Talma upon perusing these reports- if the whole point of the game was to show her withering away from her familial legacy getting tarnished, why the bloody h&ll would you avoid conveying ANY internal thoughts towards what are, even at best, unfortunate circumstances? You’re telling me they had the time to scrawl reflections on random items strewn throughout the millhouse, yet couldn’t do sh!t for the biggest part of the game?

And for a title that’s purely reliant on such bulletins for its storytelling, it’s amazing that not only are there barely any of them (I counted less than 20), but that they’re completely optional to retrieve. No seriously, you get them from a passing trader who has a history with Talma, and rather than automate this process or at least have him drop them off in her mailbox, you’re instead required to manually request each parcel. And should you forget or outright miss the guy, you’re SOL (then again, per the above, it’s not like you’re foregoing anything important….).

This serves as a good transition to the gameplay, which is where Stillness of the Wind broke me. At first glance, it seems like a conventional farming simulator -- you head outside, till squares, grow provisions, exploit your animals for commodities, scavenge outside, rinse-and-repeat. Yet what you don’t realize is that this is all a lie! You see, NOTHING you do matters because the genius devs want you to fail in the most contrived, pathetic ways possible. Through scripted events, all your livestock perish, your plants wilt, your land folds, and Talma ultimately dies. Maybe their stupid excuse for a story had some thematic threads this torture schematic was meant to support, but when a video game literally subverts its very systems for the sake of bad writing, it becomes the definition of a joke. The worst thing a game can do is waste its player’s time, and that is exactly what Stillness does -- from the get-go you’re presented with the untruth that your actions matter, that you can actually forage a future amidst the depressing news from outside, yet that’s all a grand deception meant to make you squander away hours indulging in activities you can literally skip (more on that later), no doubt to artificially elongate the playtime.

The paltry of apologists out there may stake the claim that, per my parameters, any game that ends with its main character dying is inherently a fool’s errand. Not even close to being true. The purpose of a video game is to entertain, and if partaking in its mechanisms produces a fun experience, then the end result will be a good time regardless of the fate of the protagonist. Nothing about Stillness is enjoyable in the slightest: Talma moves slow, farming comes down to generic quick-time events, you’re not given item descriptions for what’s a harvestable staple versus useless floret, you’re not told the value of anything you grow, you’re provided no indication of future weather patterns, there is literally no way of knowing when the tradesman will come by or skip a day, you can’t upgrade any of your tools, you’re forced to travel a considerable distance just to get water, and, most annoying of all, any extra animals you breed are deliberately slain during scripted wolf sequences (your gun doing jacksh!t against them).

There are additional boneheaded decisions that make Stillness even more frustrating than it needed to be: your does are only able to be milked at night despite roaming about 24/7 like it’s no one’s business; heralding the day forces you to sit through this elongated cutscene of the camera zooming in as Talma opens the door; there’s no entrance to the back of your ranch, necessitating you to walk ALL THE WAY AROUND just to pick stuff there; reading letters results in Talma pointlessly sitting on a chair and taking a noticeable second to get her @ss off it. Worse yet, Talma has an invisible stamina meter you need to restore with food, however, the game doesn’t bother telling you how much each edible replenishes.

None of this is even taking into account the bugs, which aren’t gamebreaking, but do make an already irritating experience all the more vexing. Sometimes Talma will refuse to milk the goats (and no, it’s not cause they're pregnant or that it’s night- she just doesn’t do it); petting an animal is apparently supposed to impel it to follow you, but that doesn’t happen, and if one happens to escape its pen you have to literally push it back inside; and finally, newly birthed lambs sometimes lose their color, becoming translucent outlines.

But guess what? As I alluded to earlier, you don’t have to engage in any of this aggravating rubbish because, plot twist, Talma doesn’t need to eat! You could literally boot up the game, peddle all your belongings (including your beasts of burden), ignore the postman, sit back, sip cocoa until the day ends, go to bed, rinse & repeat and you’d get the exact same result as someone like me who meandered for three hours on end+. I’d say just skip straight to sleeping, but, perhaps realizing this would expose their product for the hackery it is, the devs have prevented you from being able to do that until sundown.

Not that you’ll want to partake in this because I do not recommend The Stillness of the Wind in any way, shape, or form. It’s a title that was so desperate to be some avante-garde standout that it wholly missed the mark of what it means to be a video game. It’s not even worth a YouTube watch and is best left forgotten.

Notes
+There technically are multiple endings contingent on miniscule actions you do, but they're only minorly-different from their brethren.

-You're able to walk an extended distance in all directions: an idiotic decision given Talma's sluggish gait and the absence of anything worthwhile to find. Throw this as yet another trick the devs inputted to deceive gamers into thinking their product is bigger than it is.