It’s hard to pass up the opportunity to look at a pinecone. Really look at it. The edges, the many angled surfaces, so compact and shielding, but with a sense of this rich inner country, forever out of view. It helps, as a maths friend once told me, that pinecones are an absolute riot of primes. Anyway, if you like to look at pinecones, you’re probably going to like Stonefly. It’s a game about nature, up close, and although it’s fantastical it’s also really about how nature is pretty fantastical in the first place.
StoneflyDeveloper: Flight School StudioProducer: MWM InteractiveAvailability: Out on everything except Stadia, Summer 2021
Like Robert Hooke’s flea! There it is in Micrographia, 1665 or whatever. Fleas are so small, aren’t they, but this one is a giant. It seems to hover on the page. And the body! Armour plating, those dangling legs, concertinaed for action. Those tiny eyes, and is that a moustache? No, not a moustache – this flea looks more like a machine than a living thing. Something a tiny operator might climb aboard before setting off to scorch the earth somewhere. Horrors.
It’s not just the flea. A few years back, an insect with leg gears was discovered! Gears, naturally occurring in nature, the first proof of its kind. Again, this hopping charmer is both animal and machine, toothed sections meshing, controlling the hopping action. Insects, nature, pinecones: these things are astonishing up close.
And here we are with Stonefly, then, an action-adventure game that plays out high up in the trees, and simultaneously right down there on the Micrographia scale, the Robert Hooke scale. Branches are highways here, hollow trunks look like canyons and river beds. Scattered leaves are little arenas. And you control a tiny inventor named Annika who pilots a little insectoid mech. You know, armour plating, dangling legs, concertinaed for action. Gears meshing.
Stonefly 101 | Gameplay First Look | MWM Interactive Watch on YouTube
Stonefly is the new game from Flight School Studio, whose previous work includes Creature in the Well, which played out as a post-apocalyptic hack-and-slash powered by pinball and alive to the horrors of sudden shifts in scale. A huge arm descending from below, the sudden realisation that there are worlds stacked beyond this one, inhabitants with their own agendas. Stonefly is very different. It’s inspired by the natural world rather than the penny victories of mechanical arcades, and it’s inspired by those who have in turn taken inspiration from the natural world. Artists like Charley Harper, the mid-century wonder, who can conjure Northern Cardinals from a teardrop of red paint and a few dots and lines, whose minimalist birds and bugs seem not so much still on the page but frozen briefly between one swift movement and the next.