High up where the branches get icy, a snowstorm set in. The world was suddenly a thing of whiteness. Plodding on quite lost, I found a stranger in furs who offered to show me the way forward. We walked together, him giving occasional directions that I followed, the wind tugging at us as we went. For a few minutes the storm gave us space: there was nothing to do but find the path through this rolling blankness.
Stonefly reviewPublisher: MWM InteractiveDeveloper: Flight School StudioPlatform: Played on PC and SwitchAvailability: Out now on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch
Flight School are good at moments like this. Moments that serve to remind me that this small team makes games that are quietly like no other. Creature in the Well blended end-of-the-world posthumanism with pinball and sparking electricity and, um, a creature in the well. It was stark and memorable. Stonefly is sort of sumo and sort of a collectathon and upgradeathon, but really it’s something far more special. It’s a mech game on the microcosmic scale. The mechs you pilot and steadily upgrade are insects, all bent legs and hidden wings, and these insects are exploring a world of twigs and bracken and falling leaves. The word horde on offer says it all: canopy, bramble, maple, nightlight.
Stonefly 101 | Gameplay First Look | MWM Interactive Watch on YouTube
The world you pilot your way through is truly beautiful. Stonefly tells the story of a young inventor on the trail of her father’s mech, which she allowed to be stolen through a moment’s carelessness. To get her father’s rig back she sets off in a junker mech that will need regular improvements, and into a world of crackling bracken and lumpen moss where deeper mysteries await. Things are transformed from the perspective. Tree stumps are huge plateaus here, while mushrooms provide natural staircases. Catch a thermal upwards and you can move from one splindly branch of a tree to another, as if changing lanes on a highway, or you can leap between coils of creeper, dodging thorns. It’s nature, but it also looks like handicraft, employing a sort of mid-century children’s book aesthetic of textured paper and natural shades. Someone used a glue pot on this game! The thing Stonefly can do with browns and greens and then the occasional flaming burst of orange or yellow? It’s pretty much glorious.
Stonefly’s landscapes can be tricky to navigate at first, although restarts when you hop yourself off a branch into the abyss are fairly quick, and there’s the option to conjure a bunch of glittering little insects that will point the way to your next objective. The faff is worth the effort, though, because movement and navigation is ultimately a fairly pure thrill here. These worlds feel spindly and delicate, one layer stacked upon another. They’re brilliant to explore, because they’re all nook and all cranny. And they get the best from your mech, another thing that can take a bit of getting used to, slow on the ground but speedy when you hop back into the air. It’s a spin on The Floor is Lava – spend as much time as you can in the ether where you can move swiftly, but be aware of the fact that when you’re up there, unless you’re riding a current, you’ll slowly be coming back down to earth the whole while. Time your hops to get air when you want it. Spread your mech’s wings and make the most of your mobility.
1 of 3 Caption Attribution The art looks particularly sweet on a big telly.
The game has two main focuses. The first is combat, which is typically inventive. The game’s bucolic world is filled with bugs large and small, and you defeat them by flipping them onto their backs and then pushing them off the landscape into the depths. It’s a two-stage maneuver even before you factor in the differing bugs’ abilities – ram attacks, sudden spurts of toxic goop, nasty pincers, a weird sort of spiky inflatable thing – and the various techniques at your disposal as you upgrade. Basically, it’s no good flipping a bug if you’re nowhere near a drop to gust them over. You need to prioritise targets, but you also need to factor in the landscape around you.