Cocoon is a near-perfect puzzle game that everyone should play

A beetle protagonist emerges into a phenomenal, lonely world. There’s no preamble, no textual content overlays; not even a touch of what you’re meant to do subsequent. So, you stroll. After discovering your solution to a small staircase, you descend, and the steps disappear into the bottom — a silent cue that you just’re on the appropriate path. Just a few paces additional, you uncover a purple pad, and as you stand on it, your iridescent wings start to quiver. With out fascinated about it, you press a button in your controller, the pad turns inexperienced, and a close-by rock transforms into a brand new staircase. Progress!

After fixing a few rudimentary puzzles, you’ll encounter an orb — these are the guts (and the physique) of this recreation. You carry them in your beetle again, initially utilizing them as keys to open doorways and remedy puzzles, earlier than discovering that inside each orb is a brand new world of puzzles and challenges to beat.

Cocoon is the primary recreation from Geometric Interactive, a studio based in 2016 by Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid. Each are alums of Playdead, the Danish studio behind Limbo and Inside, for which Carlsen labored as lead gameplay designer. In case you’ve performed both of these video games, Cocoon’s quietly spectacular intro might sound acquainted. Each had been side-scrolling puzzle-platformers that used their environments and challenges to concurrently inform a narrative and information their gamers. The story is way the identical right here, however Cocoon’s construction of layered, interconnected worlds showcases one other degree of maturity and artistry.

The sport truly opens inside the orange orb, a stunning desert world, and expands out from there. Every world is protected by a guardian, which must be defeated with a view to absolutely unlock the orb’s energy exterior of that world. Unlocking the orange orb, for instance, means that you can stroll on hidden paths whereas carrying it. Every orb grants its personal powers, and all are crucial to development.

The guardians are the sport’s “boss fights.” Although there isn’t any conventional fight, every guardian is actually combative, and there’s a diploma of talent and timing required to greatest them. One of many later encounters did truly journey me up a couple of instances, which is nearly as good a time as any to say that Cocoon has completely no fail state. Getting tagged by a guardian doesn’t damage, they merely throw you exterior of their orb — hop again in and also you’ll return to the encounter inside a few seconds. Likewise, you may’t mess a puzzle as much as the purpose that you have to reload.

In isolation, the guardians are most likely the sport’s weakest moments, however they do present a pleasant break from the puzzle-solving alongside a little bit of visible spectacle. That is broadly a lovely recreation to see and listen to, filled with vivid pastel hues and beds of synth pads, and in locations it’s surprisingly gross. What begins as a tranquil stroll via one thing approximating the American Southwest shortly devolves into goopy bio-horror, and I’m very right here for it. I began enjoying the sport on a bit Ayaneo handheld PC, however about quarter-way via moved over to the Xbox — whereas it’s a enjoyable factor to play on a conveyable, the artwork and sound design actually does profit from an enormous display screen and a few respectable audio system or headphones.

I feel the larger display screen truly helped me — although that is extra a overview of my eyesight than the sport — remedy puzzles quicker. Towards the top of the sport, you’ll end up actually disoriented as you bounce out and in of worlds and portals, twisting the sport’s logic on its head to progress. I really feel like I’d’ve missed among the environmental cues — once more, my previous eyes — had I been enjoying on a 6-inch display screen.

I solely actually bought caught as soon as, after I spent an hour wandering round, attempting to determine what precisely I needed to do to resolve a puzzle. (The reply, as you’d anticipate, was blindingly apparent.) Cocoon doesn’t maintain your hand, however it’s a helicopter mum or dad — in a great way! — gently hovering over you and pushing you in the appropriate course. There are environmental cues scattered round, and also you’ll discover all through that gates shut behind you at key moments. This prevented me from attempting to double-back to see if I’d missed one thing, an exercise that represents half of my playtime in related video games. Subtly locking you in an surroundings is the sport’s approach of claiming “you may have all the pieces wanted to progress, so cease being so dense and determine it out.”

Cocoon is a recreation I can (and can) advocate to anybody that performs video video games, and lots who don’t. Maybe my solely grievance is that I would like extra. The sport solely truly introduces, to my rely, six core mechanics, and every of these are combined, matched and remixed in actually artistic methods. I respect a recreation being so long as its developer needs it to be, however the bones listed below are so good, so satisfying, that I can’t assist feeling it could maintain as much as extra orbs, extra puzzles.

That mentioned, the seven hours or so I spent with Cocoon are among the many most memorable of this decade, and I’ll positively be returning to it in a few years, as soon as my mind has purged all the solutions to its puzzles.