Stillness follows a Harvest Moon-esque gameplay style, where the player controls Talma, an elderly farmer who takes care of goats, chickens, and plants.

[1] Unlike other farming simulation games, Talma moves slowly and struggles with basic tasks, but emotes joy when taking care of her animals and laughs when playing on the ground.

[4] The idea for a game set in a rural, lonely life was from when Cardenas and his girlfriend would fantasize about moving out of London to raise goats on a homestead in the countryside.

[4] He was inspired by the films Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia and Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, and from the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

[4] Feeling that he had not properly explored the idea fully in Goats, Cardenas decided to make a follow-up game on the same subject instead of developing something completely new.