The Stillness of the Wind is a lovely, sad spin on farming games

The Stillness of the Wind is a game about loneliness and the long, slow path toward infinity.

It’s about an old woman on a farmstead who busies herself growing food, churning cheese, and harvesting mushrooms. She lives with goats and chickens and a cat, but mostly, she spends her time with memories. Her days pass into nights and around again to another day. Each is much the same as the last, and the next.

Her family lived on her desert-country farm for generations, but she is the last of them. The others, her siblings and children, communicate to her via a regular stream of letters. These conjure up abstract lives, taking place far away, full of the sophisticated, meaningless concerns of urban elites.

The woman’s body is slow, her movements calibrated to the heaviness of age. She milks her goats, stirs her curds, and waters her gardens. The Stillness of the Wind — out now for Nintendo Switch and Windows PC — occasionally feints toward cartoon farming genre-gaming, but it’s wholly a narrative experience, a habitation of the woman’s slow decline.

For awhile, I play as if it matters how many cheeses are in the pantry, or how many chickens are in the yard. But it really doesn’t matter. My tiny world becomes smaller and smaller as things matter less and less.

A trader comes by each day, offering goods for barter, gossip, and good cheer. He seems like a conduit for profitable strategies. But I soon understand I am past all that. His main function is to cheer me up, to place another marker in my routine.

I find myself engrossed in the tedium of the farm’s upkeep, its specific rhythms. But I’m also distracted by occasional cutaways, to dark dreams, to sunny memories, or the visit of a wolf at night.

The Stillness of the Wind only lasts a few hours, but it feels longer as it spools through a limited repertoire of activities. This is a game that’s less about doing and more about feeling. It’s about the mundanity of powerlessness, loss and endings, but also about how these things have their own private joys. It’s a story about living a life of boring contentment. It is meditative, slow, and sad.

The Stillness of the Wind is now available on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a final “retail” download code provided by Fellow Traveller. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.