As you all know I’m a sucker for puzzle games. Wait, did I ever make that clear in the past? I’ve covered quite a few of them before, but I don’t think I ever downright said they are my jam. The jam for which you spread on a slice of toast with peanut butter every morning for breakfast. Until you get a doctor’s note saying you have high cholesterol and you gotta eat Cheerios for now on. Whatever, it's better to say it now before I forget. I love puzzle games and any form of them. It’s good to play a game that doesn’t require too much coordination and rewards you for taking your time. It’s great to see games challenge you through its mechanics instead of combat scenario to combat scenario. It’s great to see innovators or games that are just absolutely bizarre. Just take a good gander at the developers, look ‘em straight in the eye, and say “What were you smoking?” You have detective games like Return of The Obra Dinn and Shadow of Doubt that push you to analyze crime scenes to discover what happened to the victim and what killed them. Time loop adventures like Outer Wilds and The Sexy Brutale where you go through the same events over and over until you figure out how to execute a plan using recurring events. Chants of Sennar and Heaven’s Vault where you attempt to decipher foreign languages, and the list goes on and on.
We have another entry ready to enter the hall of puzzle game greats, and that game is Cocoon. It was published three months ago by the fine folks at Annapurna Interactive, and developed by a small indie studio named Geometric Interactive. You can always rely on indie devs to deliver us the best of the best. Anyways, the game’s main director is Jeppe Carlsen who before Cocoon was the lead designer for Limbo & Inside. Two hit side scrolling horror games made by Playdead. He quickly left Playdead a few months after the release of Inside in 2016. He immediately started to work on his first big project, and the main idea behind it was worlds within worlds. There were two individuals who helped him with his game, Jaokb Schmid and Erwin Kho, and together they cracked away. Carlsen’s idea was pretty weird, so the game had to feel alien to convey his ideas. It was an obtuse universe full of bizarre creatures and sights. The game was originally going to be a sidescroller much like Carlsen’s previous works, but they ultimately abandoned the idea when they realized how much it would limit their creative vision. Instead they opted for making a full 3D world to venture through.
The game was eventually revealed in 2022 and got released one year later. Carlsen wasn’t ready for the praise the game would get. Cocoon received glowing reception across the board. It was great enough for IGN to give it a 9/10, which is rare for them when it comes to obscure indies. It currently has a cumulative score of overwhelmingly positive on Steam, which makes it fall under the small percentage of 10/10 games on that market. Cocoon was nominated for multiple awards and eventually won this year’s award for best debut indie game. I was already pretty interested in this game when it came out, but my interest peaked when it got this reward. Is the game really that good to garnish all the praise? Bought it during a sale, managed to beat it within two days, and can safely confirm that it does in fact live up. Cocoon is outstanding both from a technical perspective and from a designer’s perspective. It’s not only a cleverly designed puzzle game that manages to evolve without becoming too confusing, but presents itself in such a way where it’ll stick around in your head hours after play. Cocoon is genius. It sits with Chants of Sennaar for being the best puzzler of 2023. Let's talk about why it deserves your attention.
Story
When it comes to the story of Cocoon there’s nothing to really go off of. In fact, it’s downright nonexistent and whatever is there feels like small aspects to a big plan that ends quickly. You are a small bug-like creature which hatches from a cocoon. You have a red oval body, green wings, and aren’t much of a fighter. You awaken to find yourself within a desolate world made of rock and sand. Devoid of any form of life. Seeing how you are the only being in this world you decide to venture forward to see if you can find anyone. You discover a collection of ancient structures and a doorway blocking the path forward. A platform you're standing on begins to glow, and so you interact with it. You are then transported to a small dark room. An orb lies in the center of it and glows the same color of the deserted land you came from. The room begins to shake and all of a sudden a giant being is awoken. It begins to emit monstrous noises. Alerted of your presence in the room. It takes flight before and entering the orb.
You have no idea of what just happened. However, a new pathway opens forward and you have enough strength to go carry the orb on your back. You encounter a handful of devices the orb can activate, and one of them opens up a portal. Upon placing the orb you can transport back to the world you just came from. You can then locate the monster you awakened, defeat them, and press forward. You’ll be doing this quite a bit during Cocoon and uncover more about the world through environmental storytelling. All of it’s pretty vague, but enough to keep me intrigued to see what lies at the end. Well the game has a cute little bug for its protagonist, so that’s good enough for me to love it. Good luck solving all the puzzles ahead. There’s a ton of them.
Gameplay
Cocoon is an isometric puzzle game where you explore worlds, solve puzzles, try to understand the mechanics being thrown at you, and press forward to whatever lies ahead. The main gimmick of Cocoon is that you have these orbs containing worlds. You place the orb on a teleportation pad that allows you to enter the world, and you can get back to a central room to fetch other orbs you may need or enter another world. There are four orbs you’ll be using throughout the game and they each have their own unique environments. The orange orb is a desolate desert, the green orb is an ocean world, the purple orb is what I call doomsday world due to its dark setting, and the white orb is an alien world made up of flesh and other foreign matters. You can carry an orb into another orb’s world, and do it with another orb if you find another teleporter within the second orb’s world. There’s a puzzle near the end of the game where you quite literally need an orb in an orb within another orb in the fourth orb. There’s buttons you can interact with and contraptions you can place orbs on. For example, you can run an orb through a tube which opens up gateways to move forward. There’s this spider robot that follows you and you need them to enter certain pods and entrances so that you can progress with the game. Later puzzles will combine numerous mechanics and that’s how Cocoon challenges players. See if they know how to utilize the tools on offer while also knowing what to do in what order.
It gets even crazier when you beat bosses. Every time you enter a new world you awaken a monstrous creature. You’ll run into them when you progress far enough and must utilize a newly introduced mechanic designed for that fight. If you get caught by the boss or get hit from one of its attacks you are kicked out of the world. You can re-enter the orb and try again from a checkpoint placed outside the arena, but you will have to redo it all from square one. As long as you stay calm and know what to do you should be able to beat them easily. After you defeat a boss, the orb you defeated them in will obtain a new sort of power. These powers are then used with puzzles and that’s when the game gets complicated. A holographic bridge will appear when you walk over certain surfaces with the orange orb. Green will allow you to ascend or descend what feels like interdimensional platforms. Purple orbs can transport between pods in the world no matter where they are placed, and white orbs can shoot projectiles if you are standing in certain spots. The white orb is even needed to activate late game prisms. Besides that there’s nothing much else to say about Cocoon. There’s these hidden figures you can find throughout the world, but they are easily missable and all they really do is unlock a secret ending. Hopefully you can evolve to greater heights.
Thoughts
You know I was expecting this review to be longer, but we are reaching the end of 2023. Writing these reviews is getting a bit tiresome and I need time to think about how to arrange my end of the year list. I’ll say right now though that Cocoon is ranking high on that list. In a year full of outstanding games, genre definers, and masterpieces this is possibly one of the best. The only problem I can really think of with Cocoon is that it’s rather short. The average runtime should be around three to four hours, and after completion there’s no real reason to go back beside to find the hidden figures and achieve the secret ending. However, not every game needs to be endlessly replayable and Cocoon left a strong impression on me. I mean just a few days ago I played Venba and it too is one of the best games I’ve played this year. Have you heard about Venba? It’s a nice little narrative focused game about two Indian immigrants raising a child in Canada. Both of the parents struggle to fit in a world foreign of their own, and these problems become worse due to language barriers and their son growing distant from their culture. The mother is the head cook of the family and through cooking she connects with her family and culture. It’s a lovely game. Beautiful artstyle, music is great, and the ending almost brought tears to my eyes. I think a lot of people should be able to relate to Venba and I strongly recommend it. Wait, we were supposed to be talking about Cocoon right? Sh*t, better get back to the main subject.
Cocoon is a smartly designed puzzle game and the one thing I’m surprised it managed to do was not confuse me. Now I’m gonna get a lack of flack for saying this, but sometimes I look up the answers for the puzzle games I play. Not because I’m lazy and I just want to blaze right through them, but because they sometimes don’t always give me good hints on what I should be doing. A majority of the time I play without using a guide. Play the way the developers intended and I for these types of games I believe the devs should not point out the answers straight away. However, there comes a point when things feel too much. Whether that’s the runtime of the game or how they think the best puzzles are the ones that are big and overly complex. It’s kind of the reason why I felt fine with The Case of The Golden Idol. What it didn’t understand was that what made Return of The Obra Dinn work was how compact its investigation scenes were. Cocoon has a ton of puzzles and they get bigger as the game introduces more mechanics. However, I knew what I had to do the entire time. Just when I felt like I hit a brick wall an idea clicked in my head. I then executed said idea and suddenly I was able to progress. There’s these moments where you have to put these five symbols in a specific order. You need to look at the environment and the way they do it at times is clever. A great example being symbols reflecting in the water.
Another thing I love about Cocoon is the moment to moment gameplay. You beat a puzzle, walk a few feet, and then another puzzle is set in front of you. The game doesn’t drone on randomly, waste time, and isn’t afraid to take things quickly. When you have to journey into previous orbs to solve current puzzles the developers close off previous zones. That way you don’t backtrack and get confused on where to go. Cocoon is a game that focuses on one specific thing, but it does that thing so well that it masks other problems. I thought I was going to hate boss fights. They’re all centered around mechanics and personally I’m not a fan of gimmick bosses. However, they were really fun in this game and combined with the presentation it led to a lot of epic moments. I said the story of Cocoon is nonexistent, but to me it feels like it goes for the silent storytelling with a title like Hyper Light Drifter. There’s some interesting scenes to be found, and from there you can use your imagination to fill in the blanks. As I said at the beginning, their main goal with the world was to make it feel as alien as possible. The soundtrack and sound design much like the game is obtuse. It’s mainly synthwave and echoing noises, but it gives that feeling of being in a place far from home. It’s exactly what they needed and helps create an absorbing atmosphere.
Last thing I want to say is that I like the isometric camera and art style of the game. It reminds me a lot of this one indie I played a few years ago called Death’s Door. I think isometric cameras are probably my favorite point of view, because it gives you a good idea of what is around you and what is coming up ahead. Cocoon is a masterpiece in both design and presentation. It does everything it needs to do within its three to four hour runtime. I know people complained when it won best debut indie instead of Pizza Tower, and let me explain why. Pizza Tower in a handful of ways is a better video game, but Cocoon managed to achieve something interesting. The idea of worlds within worlds and being able to travel between them seamlessly is interesting. It’s above all innovative and I think we should point out innovative titles to more people. Helps remind the developers of the industry what we should be striving for each day. So yeah, this is a must play for anyone who likes puzzle games or wants a short yet sweet time. In the end I am going to give Cocoon a 9.5/10 for excellence at best. Oh yeah, give the same score to Venba too. Two great indies I strongly recommend.
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