Stonefly is a game about a girl's journey of "redemption" after she becomes responsible for the theft of her father's rig. A rig, in the game, seems to be a machine that imitates the jumping movement of a grasshopper, as the whole story is set in a miniature world where humans are bug-sized. It makes you wonder about what would be the most preferred way of travel in such a dimension, maybe the grasshoppers are the ideal choice.
The game does a great job of bringing out in the player a sense of joy and wonder, an almost childish amazement with a bugs' world. As a child, everybody has fantasized about being the size of an ant and live for a while in a garden. Maybe "Grounded" does a better job of fulfilling that fantasy, but here we have a more whole story told in a similarly oriented setting, with the obvious difference of being in an isometric third-person view. The game takes some care in building a world to traverse rather than survive in and tells a story in a sweet short manner using its environment fully.
I found a couple of weak points to be almost deal-breaking for me.
The game's core mechanic is to shoot at different types of bugs while avoiding their attacks. Depending on the enemy it will have to be hit one or several times before it is flipped over, and it has to be pushed out of the way to fall and finally be defeated. This gameplay is very varied with several different effects that can be used on the bugs, like a whirlwind that raises them to the air to be pushed easier, or a decoy pearl that attracts the attention of all of them. These effects will have to be applied to some enemies so they can be defeated. This variety in the gameplay makes the game attractive in its action, but this positive side is often obstructed by the terrain that battles happen in. Jumping from place to place can sometimes be tedious when the design of the playing field is not well thought out to offer a smooth experience to the player. Even out of battle, the rig can get stuck in unexpected places, sometimes it's not clear where it will land after a jump, or often the player cannot distinguish how high the rig is sliding through the air because of the monotone use of the colors throughout the game. These will eventually be the issues that bring the movement and combat experience down a level, accentuated by a slight repetitiveness and tediousness of the combat mechanic.
Leaving that more technical issue aside, I believe the game suffers the most from the lack of voicing of the characters. It's a good story that unfortunately had to be told through text balloons over character's heads and not much more. I don't need to explain what the lack of voices of characters does to a game, but let's just say nothing in the entire story was transmitted with the emotion obviously expressed in the writing. Voicing the characters would have made Stonefly an easy recommendation of a game.
One last detail to mention. I couldn't unsee the weird design of the main character's arms. Why are they much wider the closer to the hands they get? Why aren't the rest of the characters like that (except her father I think)? Maybe if it was a more consistent design choice through the characters it wouldn't have been so weird.
