A protagonist beetle emerges into a beautiful and lonely world. There is no preamble or text overlays; not even a clue as to what you should do next. So you walk. After finding your way to a small staircase, you descend and the steps disappear into the ground, a silent sign that you’re on the right path. A few steps ahead, you discover a purple pad, and as you stand on it, your iridescent wings begin to tremble. Without thinking, you press a button on your controller, the panel turns green, and a nearby rock transforms into a new ladder. Progress!
After solving a couple of rudimentary puzzles, you’ll find an orb – this is the heart (and body) of this game. You carry them around on your beetle, initially using them as keys to open doors and solve puzzles, before discovering that within each orb is a new world of puzzles and challenges to overcome.
Cocoon is the first game from Geometric Interactive, a studio founded in 2016 by Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid. Both are students of Playdead, the Danish studio behind it. Limbo and inside, for which Carlsen worked as lead game designer. If you have played any of those games, CocoonThe quietly impressive introduction may sound familiar. Both were side-scrolling puzzle-platformers that used their environments and challenges to tell a story and guide their players simultaneously. The story is very similar here, but CocoonThe structure of layered interconnected worlds shows another level of maturity and artistry.
The game really opens up. inside the orange orb, a beautiful desert world, and expands from there. Each world is protected by a guardian, who must be defeated to fully unlock the power of the orb outside of that world. Unlocking the orange orb, for example, allows you to walk along hidden paths while wearing it. Each orb grants its own powers and all are essential for progress.
The Guardians are the “boss fights” of the game. Although there is no traditional combat, each Guardian is certainly combative and a certain degree of skill and timing is required to overcome them. One of the later encounters tripped me up several times, which is a good time to mention it. Cocoon It has absolutely no failure status. Being tagged by a guardian doesn’t hurt, it just throws you out of its orb; Go back in and you’ll be back in the encounter in a couple of seconds. Likewise, you can’t mess up a puzzle to the point where you need to reload it.
In isolation, the guardians are probably the weakest moments of the game, but they provide a nice break from puzzle-solving along with some visual spectacle. This is in general terms a beautiful game to look at and listen to, full of bright pastel tones and beds of synth pads, and in places it’s surprisingly disgusting. What starts out as a leisurely stroll through something resembling the American Southwest quickly turns into a gooey bio-horror, and I’m here for it. I started playing on a small Ayaneo laptop, but about a quarter of the way through I switched to the Xbox; While it’s fun to play on a laptop, the art and sound design really benefit from a large, somewhat decent screen. speakers or headphones.
I think the larger screen really helped me (although this is more of a review of my eyesight than the game) solve puzzles faster. Towards the end of the game, you’ll find yourself really disoriented as you weave in and out of worlds and portals, changing the game’s logic to progress. I feel like I would have missed some of the environmental cues (again, my old eyes) if I had been playing on a 6-inch screen.
I only got really stuck once, when I spent an hour wandering around, trying to figure out what exactly I needed to do to solve a puzzle. (The answer, unsurprisingly, was blindingly obvious.) Cocoon He doesn’t hold your hand, but he is a helicopter parent, in a good way! — floating gently above you and nudging you in the right direction. There are environmental cues scattered throughout and you’ll notice doors closing behind you at key moments. This prevented me from trying to go back to see if I’d missed something, an activity that accounts for half of my play time in similar games. Subtly locking you into an environment is the game’s way of telling you “you have everything you need to progress, so stop being so silly and figure it out.”
Cocoon It’s a game that I can (and will) recommend to anyone who plays video games and many who don’t. Maybe my only complaint is that I want more. The game actually only features, as far as I count, six main mechanics, and each of them is mixed, matched, and remixed in truly creative ways. I appreciate a game being as long as its developer wants, but the bones here are so good, so satisfying, that I can’t help but feel like it could contain more orbs, more puzzles.
That said, the roughly seven hours I spent with Cocoon are among the most memorable of this decade, and I’ll definitely return to them in a couple of years, once my brain has eliminated all the answers to their riddles.
Interactive Annapurna
