The Stillness of the Wind

I finished The Stillness of the Wind in a single sitting and spent another twenty minutes just sitting with the silence it left behind. That's not a complaint. That's the whole point of what solo developer Coyan Cardenas, working under the Memory of God name, built here: a small, deliberate, slightly devastating thing that asks whether a game has to be fun to be worth your time. The setup is a micro-farming loop with a Harvest Moon-adjacent structure. You play as Talma, an elderly woman who stayed behind on her desert homestead while everyone else chased the city. Each day you milk the goats, make cheese at the churning station, collect eggs from the chickens, water your garden plots (the watering pot holds enough for five squares before you walk back to the well), forage the surrounding desert for mushrooms and wild herbs, cook your own meals, and wait for the traveling merchant, who is your sole human contact and also your postal service. The merchant brings letters, and the letters grow increasingly frightening as the days stack up. That drip of epistolary dread is the spine of the whole experience. You can also trade cheese, eggs, and foraged goods for hay to keep the goats fed, seeds for the next planting season, books, decorations, and, notably, shotgun shells for when wolves come at night. No dialogue choices exist. The only real tension is logistical: fitting enough chores into a day that keeps shrinking as Talma ages and the seasons turn harsher. Here's the honest tension at the center of this game: the farming loop is slow by design, and "by design" only goes so far as a defense. Talma moves with the careful shuffle of someone who has earned every one of her years, and the game makes you feel every step. Critics and players alike split cleanly on whether that intentional tedium lands as empathy or just frustration. Some found the controls fiddly enough to break the spell, fences clipping movement, items accidentally uprooted, the merchant sometimes leaving before you can reach him. Those rough edges are real. What is also real is that the game plants something in you: the anxiety of watching days grow shorter as the seasonal cycle progresses, the quiet dread when a letter arrives, and the specific loneliness of hearing children's laughter or a distant train horn as Talma tends her crops, the game's way of surfacing her memories, or possibly her dementia. The sound design earns its weight without ever reaching for grandeur. It stays close to the earth, which is where Talma lives. The whole experience runs around three hours. That is the right length, though a handful of reviewers argued it still outstays its welcome in the middle section. I'd push back on that gently. The repetition is the message. What the game is genuinely and unarguably less good at is onboarding. Nothing tells you how hungry Talma is getting. Losing a goat to neglected hay the first time around feels arbitrary rather than meaningful, and a reset to start fresh carries a real time cost. These are genuine friction points, not aesthetic choices. The PC version holds up fine technically, though macOS support has narrowed significantly over the years due to OS compatibility issues, so check your system before buying. For the right person, this is one of the more honest things the indie space has made about old age, filial abandonment, and the slow erasure of a way of life. It sits in a small cluster alongside games like Where the Goats Are (its own free predecessor), and it asks you to hold something heavy for three hours. If you want systems depth, branching choices, or a satisfying feedback loop, this will feel like an empty afternoon. If you want the kind of experience that lingers the way a particular smell from childhood lingers, quiet and a little unbearable, it delivers that with real craft.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on The Stillness of the Wind.