Flight School Studio’s Stonefly is a lovely game that features a creative story, a gorgeous art style, and gameplay that is more relaxing than it is intense and frustrating. The only knock is some finicky controls, but that isn’t an obstacle that is going to get in the way of your enjoyment of the game.
What I like about indie developers the most in the video game world is their ability to take chances and go off the blueprint when it comes to game design. What is this blueprint I speak of? Well, it’s a term I use in relation to the industry that means they aren’t just printing the same thing over and over again year-in and year-out. They’re not listening to a CEO or budget officer telling them that ‘if we do the game this way again, then that means we’re earning X amount of profit’. If you don’t think that is a thing in the industry, then welcome to the gaming world! It’s a thing.
Anyway, thankfully the indie world is thriving right now as people are searching for something different. Sometimes that ‘different’ comes in insect-like packages. Welcome to Stonefly from Flight School Studio.
Bugging Out
Stonefly is an interesting game that really focuses on three main parts: story, exploration, and gathering. There isn’t much beyond that, but for the gameplay structure, having something beyond that isn’t necessary. It’s a pleasant game that doesn’t ask too much from you and quite frankly, especially around E3 time, I’ll take that type of game. Let’s break this gameplay down.
Story
You play Annika, a tiny being that lives in the woods with her father, and who has aspirations of becoming as great as her father is with mech bugs that he builds. She wants to contribute to her family and prove herself to her father. The story begins with her father’s mechanical bug stolen from their tree garage because Annika didn’t lock it up after using it. Feeling terrible guilt and need for proving to her father that she is worth the grief, Annika goes on a journey to seek out the missing bug mech. Along the way, she runs into a rogue group of mech pilots that end up needing her help. After helping out, she befriends them and joins their group, thus getting her first mech (an old one) to gather up material and find her father’s missing mech. The rest of the story is filled full of quests, goals, and finding her family’s mechanized gatherer. Is it a complicated story? Nah, but it’s a good wholesome story filled full of creatively crafted characters. It drives the gameplay and drives the player’s agency to keep up this beautiful and adorable world.
Exploration
On the exploration side of the tracks, you can take the bug-like mech out and about in the nature-filled world around you. You can jump from leaf to leaf, branch to branch, or catch a nice draft up to get to multi-tiered levels. The world doesn’t try to be more than it is in this game, but it’s a big game in scope and you won’t mind the repeating structures thanks to how gorgeous the art style is in the game. The art of the game is probably one of the best parts of it. Hand-drawn sketches show the visual love affair the artist had with the characters. Anyway, there is plenty to explore and you will want to do that quite a bit.
Gathering and crafting
The crux of the gameplay design revolves around gathering and getting your mech built out in the game. The story will progress this and the player’s motivation to improve and customize their mech will also push this agenda forward. To improve your mech through various upgrades (Core, Defense, etc.), which will allow Annika to progress forward in her quest, you will go exploring to locate minerals that are out amongst nature. Some of these minerals are straightforward with little to no effort, but some require you to break open material and gather it. Sometimes it is as simple as what that sentence described and sometimes you have to fend off some bugs to gather the materials.
The fighting system is simplistic on paper. You can float around and unleash a nice disruptive bomb beam that will eventually flip bugs over on their back. Once flipped over, you perform an air push, which propels the poor critters off whatever platform you might be fighting them on. It’s really a very non-destructive game, where we all hope that the bugs are okay, but we’re certainly glad they are gone. Some bugs don’t easily go down, some have patterns that disrupt your gameplay, such as opening their wings to push you off, and some are just huge creatures that require a different sort of finesse to get them gone. The entire fighting system seems to positively reflect on helping out nature and not just ‘squishing’ bugs like some maniac.
While that might sound like easy fighting mechanics, you should know that the bugs can be aggressive in large groups. For example, I was fighting and pushing tiny beetles off the side of a leaf when all of a sudden a medium-sized beetle with pinchers grabbed my mech and tossed it off the leaf. During fights, the game forces you to strategize and think about how you are going to approach groups of varying enemies, all of whom have unique ways to take you away from your mineral gathering. It’s a good way for the gameplay to mix things up and make it more intense, which you need in gameplay from time to time. The fighting is something that I certainly enjoyed, as it provided an ‘order of operation’ feel to the entire process.
If you’re wondering about damage during this phase of gameplay, don’t worry about it! You never truly die in the game. Your mech does become damaged the more you fall off, and certain functions of the mech will stop working if you don’t repair it quickly (just like in Battletech Simulators) but you never truly die in this game. If you fall off a leaf, you are sent back to the location that you’re at and will eventually have to repair the mech if things get worse over and over again. The repair feature works slowly and will render most of the mech’s functionality useless whilst under the process of repair. It makes sense and certainly offers up some decision-making and timing that the player has to consider throughout a fight. Ultimately, it’s a fair trade-off in the game to death.
Controls are a bit feisty
The only real issue I have with this game is how the controls work. On the Xbox controller, if you press A the mech will float up. If you press B, the mech will float gently, yet quickly to the ground. If you press X the mech will let out a nice little bomb (at least at the beginning), and if you hold down on A the mech will lock to the location that it is standing on (works great against the wind). The LB button would gather materials, while the RT button would unleash a pushing wind. Double-tapping A will have you fall quickly to the ground but then bounce quickly back up. I swear, and this might be me getting old, I mixed up my A and B button functionalities on a regular basis, which would often frustrate me during the battle phase of the game. It certainly wasted enough time and provided some cursing moments in the game. There were times where I would hover over a bug, prep my bug bomb, then panic push A by accident. Over time, the buttons became easier and more muscle-memory oriented, but I still fumbled the controls more times than often throughout the entire experience. Is it a me thing? I always blame myself first, but this feels like it was more of translating a PC control scheme to Xbox issue. I can see how this would work better with the mouse and keyboard. Anyway, just a bit of feisty control issues, but nothing too damning for this title.
Conclusion
Flight School Studio’s Stonefly is a lovely game that features a creative story, a gorgeous art style, and gameplay that is more relaxing than it is intense and frustrating. The only knock is some finicky controls, but that isn’t an obstacle that is going to get in the way of your enjoyment of the game.
