Content warning for discussions of futility in death and suicide/self-harm.

A waste of time.

A lot of games are about death. I won’t get all Philosophy 101 on you and say that Pac-Man fleeing from ghosts is a Freudian metaphor for pursuing Eros and avoiding Thanatos, but it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that death is everywhere in games. It’s primarily a narrative device — death is inherently ripe for drama as the last thing any of us will ever experience, meaning it can be played as heroic, sad, joyful, angry, honestly however you’d like — but it’s rarer for death to be a mechanical focus. Puzzlers like Karoshi and 5 Minutes to Kill Yourself do task the player with actively seeking out death, but these are predominantly played for laughs; most people who play these titles won’t get much out of them beyond a grossed-out laugh at making a salaryman drop a safe on his own head or making an office worker swing a stapler into his face, respectively.

Player death is usually a consequence for some sort of failure; the amount of allowed mistakes finally reaching a critical threshold where the only remaining option is to punish the player by killing them. You’d have a hard time listing games where this isn’t the case, especially if you weren’t allowed to look outside of what’s popular. The top hundred games for sale right now likely all feature the constant, looming threat of player death as a fail state, setting aside the use of death as a narrative element that many titles also lean upon.

Death is everywhere in games.

The Stillness of the Wind is not about death. It’s about dying.

This is a deceptive title, though it really makes no effort to be. Every store page that this game is on practically tells you what’s going to happen before you’ve even purchased it: the tagline is “a quiet game of life and loss”, and you should immediately be able to figure out where this story ends the second you load in and you’re playing as a lonely, hobbling old woman on a goat farm. Even with as much warning as you could possibly be given — too much warning, one could argue — Stillness of the Wind doesn’t portray everything as doomed from the word go. In fact, you’ll likely be overburdened with the sheer amount of things that need to be taken care of. Mechanically speaking, this is really no different from any standard farming simulator game, only with the pace cranked way, way down to compensate for the fact that you’re playing as a lady in her twilight years.

You’ll start off milking goats, making cheese, collecting eggs, sowing seeds, foraging around for trinkets and mushrooms. It isn’t long before the mailman-slash-merchant comes around that you get introduced to the bartering system, where you can stock up on all sorts of required materials. Your goats need hay, so you can trade a half dozen eggs for a couple bales; wolves are whispered to be lurking around, so you can pick up a few shotgun shells to scare them off; he’ll even bring around a billy goat during breeding season that you can borrow for a night to make your goats have kids, ensuring the farm can keep a stable population. There’s so much to do that establishing a consistent routine can be a little tricky, and it won’t be long before you’re eating meager meals of eggs and tomatoes to sustain digging a couple of extra farming plots after the sun has gone down.

But it’s all a facade. Without a word of warning, the shadows start getting longer earlier in the day. The time you have to work shrinks. More wolves come. Your chickens stop laying, and then they start dying. The goats stop eating. Letters stop coming. You run out of seeds to plant. Your crops dry up. The mailman’s inventory dwindles to little more than a bale or two of hay. Your cheese turns black and inedible on the shelf. You’re always tired, no matter how much you sleep. You begin to walk with a limp, and then you degrade into a slow shuffle. The kids won’t be weaned off of milk, but their mothers will be too starved to provide them or you with any. You have nightmares. Your family, far away, suffer. What mail you get tells of a world far away that’s falling apart. You can no longer sustain yourself, but there’s nobody else around to help.

It isn’t long before there’s nothing left, and you see how much of a farce this all was. Your final nightmare brings you to nothing more than rows and rows of scarcely-marked graves, lined up beneath a dark sun. Hundreds upon hundreds of crosses planted into dirt mounds trail along the horizon and stretch themselves beneath the frame. Too many dead bodies all in one spot. More than there should ever be. You wake before you’ve seen them all. It’s impossible to tell how many more there were. Powerful winds blow, grey-green clouds blotting out the sun and casting you in darkness during your final days. The goats — if any have survived — are scared. The wind and rain never stop. There’s nothing left to do. No crops to water, no milk to churn, no mushrooms to forage, no eggs to collect, nothing you could barter for. The mailman arrives with a final letter to let you know that your daughter will try to get to you through the storm.

She doesn’t make it. You never see anyone again.

Winter comes. Everything freezes. What hasn’t died yet now perishes. You are not spared this fate. You walk back inside and quietly fade away.

It’s an exhausting game. Once your mechanics start being stripped from you, beginning with the shorter days, you start to realize just how much time you’re wasting. Unmilked goats could have made cheese. Uncollected eggs disappear. Unwatered plants die. You have to choose what to focus on to the neglect of everything else, and none of it even matters in the end. It’s an outstanding bit of narrative harmony.

I won’t go as far as to say that I think farming simulators needed something like this — a slow piece that examines the futility of establishing routines and grinding to get the maximum amount of bartering materials and collectible trinkets — but I’m glad that this can exist alongside them. Stillness of the Wind hardly feels like a contrast to something like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley; rather, it’s a complimentary material that showcases the inevitable death and decay waiting for them at their ends.

My only complaint really lies in the world-building that’s established here, because it feels to me as though it leans too much into the supernatural. The talk of lunar colonies and inter-planetary travel certainly surprised me at first glance, but didn’t feel as though they detracted from the story. The discussions about how entire towns have vanished into thin air and mysterious, unending carnivals that draw in unsuspecting people did feel a bit at-odds with what was being presented, though. It was a distraction that the game didn’t need, and it hurts what is otherwise an exceptionally grounded narrative.

At the end, though, when there’s nothing you can do besides sit next to the mailbox and wait for a delivery that never comes, it’s easy to want to let go. All of this is so tiring, and so futile. There’s no point in clinging to it, because there’s scarcely anything left to cling to. As Nic Pizzolatto wrote for True Detective, it’s a relief to realize that you don’t have to hold on so tight. You can just let it slip away, and make your peace with it.

I didn’t.

But it’s not really up to me, anyway.