Without a single word, Cocoon takes a small, cicada-like creature on an exciting journey through the cosmos using only a thumbstick and a single button. That setup should sound exceedingly familiar for fans of gameplay designer Jeppe Carlsen's previous work, Limbo and Inside. But here, Cocoon differentiates itself from those monumentally creepy side-scrolling adventures as a 3D puzzle-platformer, and the additional dimension provides a refreshing amount of, well, depth to its challenging and intriguing puzzles. These puzzles build on each other in smart ways, keeping fundamental mechanics from the desert at the very start integrated and important all the way to the end. And even as Cocoon gets more and more complex, its minimalist controls make sure it never feels overwhelming.
It’s not long before your cicada is unexpectedly whisked out of that barren starting area and into a harsh mechanical one, and it’s there you find your first orb – a mysterious orange sphere that somehow contains that entire previous desert world inside of it.
You can pick this world up and carry it around, using it to power platforms, lifts, and other machines that impede your progress. Solving these puzzles as you swap between worlds is a wonderful time; seeing how each piece of the puzzle interacts with others and figuring out the layers between them is some of the most mesmerizing and engaging stuff I've seen in a while.
And it’s dazzlingly beautiful. While Limbo and Inside both stuck with a simpler, more monochromatic tone, Cocoon breaks out of that mold with vibrant, curated color palettes. Each world has its own distinct color and vibe, from the warm sands of its first orange orb-world to the squishy and alien textures of the purple one later on.
As you progress through the relatively short five or six-hour story, the orb-worlds unveil special powers; revealing hidden paths, changing the state of objects between gaseous and solid, and other abilities that provide solutions to puzzles that were impossible before. It’s almost Metroidvania-like that way. Eventually, our little cicada friend is juggling and hopping between several of these different uniquely designed orb-worlds, with the only connection between them being the strange alien technology powering everything. Keeping track of each world's position and seeing how many layers deep you can place them almost feels like a dream; trying to remember where you placed the orange orb that's holding the white and green orbs while you're in the purple one can be a strange, almost mystifying experience sometimes.
Each orb ends with a boss fight that's as unique as the world that contains it, providing a new final puzzle and challenge for step of the way. Every boss has a specific mechanic that's used to take them down, like a weakness to the explosives that grow nearby or trapping their legs in an amber-like substance. With only one button, the team at Geometric went above and beyond in designing some intense, engaging combat scenarios without sacrificing Cocoon's adventurous, curious feel. Puzzling out the patterns of the bosses takes the interactions you've learned with different objects and turns them upside down – carrying a ball and timing out when to cross a platform becomes holding an explosive flower and dodging the crystal structures one boss leaves in its path in an almost rhythm game-like fashion.
Don't let those combat sections fool you, though; Cocoon is a puzzler through and through. With the orbs being both the worlds the levels are contained in and batteries for the technology within them, this is a game that’s ready to bend reality and challenge you in the best of ways.
These puzzles are no joke, especially if you find yourself stuck – with little but trial and error, some of them can feel like you're retracing your steps over and over again as you try and swap between orbs one at a time. Eventually, though, the hints contained in the level design become clearer; a color-coded pathway will appear, or the rock formations in the distance will be covered in moss to give you a clue about which orb to use. But it’s not obvious, to the point where there were a couple times where I was convinced that I had somehow broken a puzzle by placing some objects in the wrong spot and sealing certain pathways off by doing so. Every time, though, I was able to find my way through before my patience ran out; sometimes, the spots where I felt way off course even ended up being vital solutions to the puzzle!
A subtle bit of encouragement comes in the form of musical cues and triumphant swells that occur as you get closer and closer to the solution, cheering you on the whole time and adding to the feeling of discovery and accomplishment you feel once you finally crack the puzzle.
Right before the repetition and feeling of walking the same paths back and forth starts to wear thin, Cocoon loops around from the verge of frustration to an almost Zen-like experience. You’re introduced to new and exciting concepts that eventually become natural and easy; what was once an entire solution is now barely even a piece of a much larger puzzle. The absence of any overt guidance as I made my way through this wordless story made it feel like the cicada is being compelled by some force, natural or otherwise, to complete its task.
All of this is this little guy’s role in the universe – even if we don't know exactly what we're doing, we're helping him push forward and discovering the larger meaning of these puzzles as we do. As things click together, it starts feeling like the times I figured out why an old boss of mine would have me do a bunch of seemingly pointless, disconnected tasks, only to find out later that each of those tasks was part of a project so large I couldn’t see the shape of it at the time. It's a strange feeling, but rewarding nonetheless.
Later puzzles add layers to the complexity and the need to basically open your third eye to solve them. It’s not unlike the feeling of getting the hang of Portal, where suddenly there’s an entirely new way of thinking about what’s possible in a space. Once you start bouncing between each world, bringing one orb into another and using its abilities to trigger something you couldn't before, everything really starts to click; the depth of what's going on here is easy to miss, thanks to the simplified control scheme and deceptively uncomplicated art style, but the way you can seamlessly hop in and out of different worlds – and even place a world within a world in order to solve certain puzzles – is really something to behold.
Despite that layered and compounding challenge, Cocoon doesn't last very long at all – my first playthrough took a crisp five and a half hours, though it also contains plenty of replay value in finding the hidden Moon Ancestor collectibles tucked away in each world. Each of these collectibles are incredibly well hidden, but the feeling of intrigue I got while finding them (and the achievements you get for them) compelled me to find more whenever I could. Even though I wasn't able to find them all, the feeling of the few that I did find blew me away; I'll definitely be coming back to find the rest.
