【Taste of Secret Sex】

When we talk of nostalgia in games,Taste of Secret Sex it's usually about the love for retro art styles, chiptunes, genres, or consoles. But another, more valuable relationship to nostalgia is embedded into the medium. And it's in how games can uniquely explore the experience of lost childhood -- of longing for that time when home was somewhere safe, bright, untouched by the darkness of reality.

From AAA classics like Legend of Zeldato recent indie hits like What Remains of Edith Finch, game journeys force you to face a distorted version of that idealized concept of home -- whether its the apocalyptic emptiness of Kokiri forest when you return as adult Link, or the whisper of family memories haunting the dilapidated, deserted house you grew up in.

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The recently released indieStillness of Windcaptures what it means to lose something that exists now only in your imagination. Talma is the last remaining member of her large family left to run their quaint farm alone after, one by one, everyone else moved to the city.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Never leaving the small radius of the farm, you quickly settle into a Harvest Moon-like pattern of milking goats, tending to crops, and collecting chicken eggs. Your only human interaction is with an old friend who's also a traveling merchant, along with the updates and letters he brings from family in the city.

It's a humble, quiet, laborious, solitary, repetitive lifestyle. As an old woman, you move painfully slowly to accomplish a long list of chores you can never complete in a single day. Survival is a daily, anxious struggle against scarcity of resources and time. There is always more to be done but, when night falls, there are no street lamps or neighbors to shed light on the total darkness of your farm's seclusion.

What should be an agonizingly tedious experience is instead a gift of indescribable tranquility.

But somehow, what should be an agonizingly tedious experience is instead a gift of indescribable tranquility.

The Stillness of Windisn't just about nostalgia for a lost, idyllic childhood. It mourns the loss of a passing way of life, as you learn through letters how each of Talma's family members were slowly swallowed by the city. None of them seem to remember why they left her, or the farm, or whether escaping the arduous farm life even made them happier.

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But, they all write, I guess it's what you do when you grow up: You move to the city. You leave the safety of home behind. You do your best to forget what you've lost. You trade unchanging monotony for unstable ephemerality.

In the day to day flow of The Stillness of the Wind, you lose track of the passage of time. But just as you start to get comfortable in your mastery of its system, the season changes. Your daily return is interrupted by bleak and surreal dreams of your beautiful farm buried under toxic fumes. You try to go about your day anyway, but it's like moving in slow motion.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The Stillness of Wind is a testament to what great designers can achieve with very little. The scope of this game is tiny, with nothing more than a single location and handful of simple interactions. But its ambition is enormous, speaking to a universal sensation from within the confines of an old woman's farm in the middle of nowhere.

As the name suggests, this is a game that expects you to learn to live with stillness. For large portions, you're forced to do the unthinkable in a video game: do nothing. Sometimes for several minutes. Many will also probably be turned off by the sheer arduousness of interaction, like having to both open and close the fence door behind you, sometimes accidentally dropping your watering can in the process.

But every frustration feels purpose. "Isn't there an easier way to do this?" you might start asking yourself angrily. Yes, there is an easier way. And the whole point is that Talma deliberately did not choose it.

Few games -- even the ones that purport hardcore realism like Red Dead Redemption 2-- actually force you to contend with the natural patterns and confines of life. But the struggles inStillness of Windare all elemental, like overcoming the obstacle of your own slow-moving old bones or not having enough hours in the daylight.

While the game makes you long for the idyllic promise of grazing goats and open fields, it also does everything to disillusion you of that lifestyle. Much like the nostalgia for that perfect childhood in your memory, it's a longing for something that either never really existed or that you can never go back to.

You are left with the sense that you -- that we all -- have lost something invaluable. But it's OK. That's just how life works.

You can play The Stillness of the Wind on iOS, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

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Topics Gaming