Stonefly knows that mechs and bugs are the same beautiful thing

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.

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.

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