The Stillness of the Wind Review: As Slow and Forgetful as Gram Herself

The Stillness of the Wind was my first impulse purchase of the year. Earlier in the month, I had a long weekend and was looking for a game to play that wasn’t going to take a long time to beat. The Stillness of the Wind was one of the first games I came across and it immediately caught my attention as a slow-paced, cozy-looking game. Perfect for a long, winter weekend.

Developed by Memory of God, The Stillness of the Wind is a quiet game about an old woman living on a small farm in the middle of nowhere. Every day there are chores to attend to, and every day it’s up to the player to get as much done as possible before the sun goes down and the chore list is refreshed for the next day. As a slow-moving granny, your movements are limited and there will only be so much you can accomplish each day. Most days will come to a close long before you got to do everything you could do.

The old woman’s farm is a quaint cluster of buildings and some small, fenced-in areas. The game begins with around six chickens and two goats. Feed the goats hay to be able to milk them. Turn the milk to cheese. Sell the cheese to the mailman for hay that you use to keep the process going. You can also plant a garden and go out in the area surrounding the farm to scavenge for herbs and mushrooms for food.

As the days go by, the game’s story is told through a series of letters the old woman gets from the only other physically present character in the game, her friendly mailman. The narrative is grim, and paints a picture of a bleak existence where people only think of you occasionally and the rest of the time they’re caught up in their own lives. If you have elderly relatives, this game will make you feel guilty for not keeping in touch with them as you probably should, or could.

Unfortunately, the story was as vague as it was grim. Being so isolated from the rest of the world meant that I had to fill in the blanks for the majority of the places and events that the other people spoke about in their letters. The only other correspondence was the brief chats I’d have with the mailman — which were half tutorial-hints and half actual narrative. A few times during the day-night cycle, the old woman has odd dreams that I couldn’t figure out the meaning of, or the purpose. They just kind of happened and then it was time to go water the plants.

Adding to the confusion was some frustration. A few game-breaking bugs required me to restart my progress and because the game is so linear and slow-paced, having to re-do content wasn’t very enjoyable. The bugs ranged from farm tools becoming stuck, goats dying to the old woman locking into a walking animation and endlessly walking away. These issues were echoed in the game’s Steam discussion forums, so I know I wasn’t the only one. The developed pushed through a patch that allegedly fixed some of those issues, but I don’t know how that impacts players on the mobile/Switch versions of the game, or if it will even effect players (like me) who already beat the game.

Some of the games well-working mechanics were also a little mysterious. I never quite figured out how the hunger system worked, or what happened to my chickens — they all just vanished one morning. I ran out of firewood, but I had plenty of cheese yet the game wouldn’t let me eat any of it. One of my goats fell over dead even though there was plenty of hay in the pasture, and one night wolves showed up but they didn’t do anything and just left before I could use my shotgun. It was hard to shake the feeling that the game wasn’t completely finished.

The Stillness of the Wind gives you some agency in how to approach your tasks every day, but the game is very linear otherwise. By the game’s predictable ending, I didn’t know how to feel. Altogether, my emotions ended up being a bit of sadness, confusion and annoyance all pushed into one sigh of ennui.

A retail copy of this game was purchased by Epic Brew.