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Stonefly's battling bug mechs are out now

Stonefly has offered an ideal experience so far. The action game about piloting bug-sized mechs was announced via an exciting and stylish trailer and now, three months later, it's out. That's it. I wish all videogames were as instantly captivating and swiftly released.

Developers Flight School Interactive describe Stonefly as "Rogue One shrunk down to Fern Gully size". You play Annika Stonefly, a young mechanic and mech pilot searching for her father's lost mech. That search takes the form of exploration and combat in a mech of your own, interspersed with conversations with the members of Acorn Corp.

It looks fabulous. I love its art style, particularly its use of texture. Some surfaces are almost flat colours, others have visible line work, and the mixture makes every scene so rich to look at. It's helped by its miniature setting, where fights are often taking place on a tree branch with a forest seemingly stretching away beneath you.

The combat iself looks fun, too. You'll unlock new abilities for your mech as you go, but tactically defeating your bug enemies seems to involve flipping them on their backs and then punting them off the aforementioned branches. It looks…

Stonefly Review

We’d have bet our house on Stonefly being a 2021 highlight. It’s the sophomore game from developer Flight School, who brought us the superb Creature in the Well, a dungeon-crawler/pinball hybrid that lit up Game Pass. 

In every trailer and screenshot, Stonefly oozes class: it carries over some of Creature in the Well’s aesthetic, with blocks of colour criss-crossed with scratches. Then there’s the Honey-I-Shrunk-My-Mech theme, with spidery exoskeletons battling with garden bugs. And finally, there’s the elevator pitch: a Diablo-a-like but designed to be laid back. Everything about Stonefly points to an indie darling. It’s beautiful, clever, has good pedigree and isn’t like anything you’ve ever played. Prep your accolades.

Except there’s a rather large BUT. Stonefly isn’t particularly good, and that revelation is as surprising as it is disappointing. 

It starts off well, yet still with a seed of something being wrong. As we surmised from the trailers, it looks astonishing. Everything is stippled and scuffed to give it a natural texture, and you feel like you’re in a kid’s nature collage. While recent games might have covered similar ‘lost in your garden’ territory, like It Takes Two and Grounded, neither game feels anything like Stonefly…

Stonefly Review – Serene Teen in a Mean Mech Machine

Developed by: Flight School Studio

Published by: MWM Interactive

Available on: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5

MSRP: $19.99

I don’t care for mech media. Stuff like Gundam and Evangelion always struck me as properties that took away from the coolness of mechs. Mopey teens and adults dealing with trauma set to the admittedly awesome backdrop of giant fight mechs. If you could cut out all the talky bits and just focus on giant robots doing their thing, it would be much better. I’m not making any friends with these broad, sweeping generalizations about mech media. Stonefly is different.

There is no mech bureaucracy threatening the lives of pilots. There is no undercurrent of unresolved trauma. There are no mechs as an allegory for Christ. Stonefly tells a simple story well. You are Annika Stonefly, a young person living amongst the trees in the absolutely giant world of Stonefly. Everything takes place in a world where either the main characters are very small, or the world is very big. You work with your aging father, repairing the mechs of Stonefly, called “rigs” in the game. One day after noticing a shortage…