Stilstand
Year: 2020
System: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, PlayStation 4, Switch, Game Boy (no seriously)
Developer: Niila Games
Players: Single
Genres: Interactive Fiction
Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1282320/Stilstand/?curator_clanid=40000720
A dark, whimsical, and absurd interactive comic by artist Ida Hartmann, exploring the despair and loneliness of a young woman living alone through a long summer in Copenhagen. It is a deeply personal journey into the mind of a young woman as she tries to stay afloat in Copenhagen during a summer riddled with hopelessness. Amid the desire for isolation there’s still a hope that one day, things will change. Maybe the shadow monster in her apartment can help her?
Stilstand is a personal and hand-drawn tale about the high expectations and the fragile limbo of feeling stuck in life. It is a whimsical and absurd portrayal of anxiety, loneliness, and despair, and brings the player with it on an adventure into the emotional landscape of a lost soul.
Winner of the Best Emergent Game award at Spilprisen 2021
This is a short game in the style of the old-school hypertext fictions or interactive fiction games that popped up back when multimedia first started becoming a thing. The game is fairly short, about an hour, and presented as a series of comic panels with limited interactivity. It’s the debut game of Ida Hartmann where she experimented with the concept of interactive art, using her depression and existential angst as a subject. This is either very exciting or incredibly uninteresting depending on what you want from games - but for the launch party, the programmer ported the entire game to Game Boy, and we are now in possession of one of the three existing cartridges with said version.
