Cocoon Game Review
Cocoon, the lead gameplay designer behind LIMBO and INSIDE, offers a mesmerising adventure across worlds that fit inside each other. The game is an endurance spectacle that requires patience to conquer but rewards players with a handful of satisfying puzzles.
The world-hopping mechanic in Cocoon is brilliantly paced and implemented. It never feels like a gimmick but rather a natural extension of the player’s abilities.
It’s a puzzle game.
Cocoon is an intimate, surreal puzzle game full of beautifully complex mechanics. It features a cicada-like character roaming desert lands in search of orbs that contain entire microcosms within them, and placing them in the right location triggers reflections to open those worlds. The game is a masterclass in combining simplicity with depth and features fantastic art design that feels both synthetic and organic.
Developed by Geometric Interactive, Cocoon is the debut game from a team led by Limbo and Inside gameplay designer Jeppe Carlsen. This pedigree has resulted in a tightly crafted, intelligent experience that will get your brain humming and clicking without driving you crazy.
The mechanics in Cocoon juggling worlds within worlds start out feeling arbitrary and alien, but they slowly grow into natural laws of the universe, and you’ll find yourself absorbing them. The game also does a great job of keeping the puzzles focused on what’s relevant to your progress, restricting routes and locking off areas that don’t pertain to your current quest.
It’s a mystery.
Cocoon’s mind-warping puzzle mechanics and out-of-this-world setting make it a must-play game. Its mystery is woven into the very fabric of the world as you wander from desert to marsh to grey industrial environments, all of them inhabited by organic fauna and the industrial scaffolding of an unseen entity. It isn’t always clear what exactly is happening, and the fact that your beetle-person character can’t jump or attack enemies keeps the focus firmly on exploring the game’s world and figuring out its various complexities.
The puzzles begin simple and logically, with you manipulating levers and switches to open doors and activate machinery. Soon, you’ll start to find spheres that can be placed in special puddles to enter other worlds, a conceit that opens up whole new ways to explore and challenge players. Even when the number of possible combinations starts to multiply, Cocoon never feels overwhelming, thanks to a smart system that restricts movement options and only highlights areas relevant to your current puzzle-solving mission.
It’s a journey.
Cocoon’s world-building isn’t as expansive or clear as, say, Portal or the Shimmer in Annihilation, but it makes up for this in other ways. It lets you experience a sense of escapism that feels more like the kind of transportive tone piece that video games excel at.
The game’s bare-bones control system — moves in one direction and interacts with the environment with a single button — leaves you to focus on puzzles without getting distracted. It also keeps your thought process in the spotlight with a sequence of expertly crafted “a ha!” moments that propel you to new levels and deeper brain teasers.
The dazzlingly curated colour palettes of the different worlds you visit also add to the feeling that you are being transported. From the warm sand of the first orange orb-world to the squishy biomes and industrial scaffolding of the purple one, it all works together to create a unique world that is unlike any other.
It’s a masterpiece.
Aside from the game’s brilliant mechanics, it also features gorgeous, evocative visuals. Its colour palette ranges from orange-hued desert to green jungle to grey industrial environments and features both organic and mechanical elements. The game’s music, an eerie futuristic synth mix, is also used to guide the player. It swells when the player is close to reaching a key object or solving a puzzle.
Cocoon is a masterwork of exploration and discovery. The game’s smart systems are gradually revealed at a pace that allows the player to experiment and push boundaries without ruining the mood with overt tutorials.
Cocoon is also unique in that it uses a classic ability-based progression system in conjunction with its world-jumping mechanics. This allows the player to experiment with a new ability and discover how it can be used in different worlds. This helps to keep the player engaged and empowered, making the experience more rewarding. Defeating each world’s boss is the ultimate reward and a great example of this mechanic in action.