As students, we likely play games for relaxation purposes, whether it be following a long day of lectures or revelling in your free time before the weight of the world is once again on your shoulders. That is, unless you’re playing Cocoon: Jeppe Carlsen and Geometric Interactive’s 2023 indie puzzle gem in which you literally carry the weight of miniature spherical planets atop your joints.
Described as “an adventure across worlds within worlds“, Cocoon thrusts you into control of some conspicuous and colourful little beetle who can casually pick up pocket-sized planets, carry them around, jump into them and completely collide them with other worlds, creating a brain-bending, dimension-leaping puzzle adventure basked in sci-fi futurism and psychedelia.
Immediately upon your insertion into the initial desert landscape, Cocoon demonstrates how games can be art. Coming to you from the mind behind legendary, dark and era-defining puzzle games Limbo and Inside, this game presents a more verdant and illuminated look at the director Carlsen’s creative visions. Juxtaposing the near-colourless, shrouded in shadow aesthetics of his previous games, Cocoon triumphs in its gorgeous terrains and vistas, neatly aligned with the metallic and ostensibly alien interiors of the interdimensional hubworld, feeling as if they were just gouged out from the likes of Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Similarly, the game’s soundscape by Jakob Schmid is a courteous, soaring and certain homage to these sci-fi influences. The score often leaves you in isolation, to roam these little foreign lands with planets on your back and nothing but the pitter-patters of your feet to keep you company. Instead, an excellent creative choice is made to make the music appear and swell only when you are doing things correctly. Once an interplanetary puzzle clicks in your mind, the music declares in its synthed-up surges that you’re onto something.
This idea makes for one of Cocoon’s greatest strengths: the subtle and passive hand-holding that never feels abrasive. In an era of yellow-paint signals or footstep trails to guide you to the next area, or perhaps your character loudly narrating what they think they (under your control) should do, Cocoon‘s design has no tutorial, no dialogue, and yet it is ironically one of the best entry-level games to get into the medium.
Requiring nothing but two buttons and a working brain to play, Jeppe and his team chose to tutorialise through great baby-step puzzles introducing new mechanics, with the synthy ambience returning to congratulate you per each mystery solved. There is undoubtedly some brain-frying enigmas also, the kind that’ll have you drawing a map out in your head or contemplating a quick Google search that ruins the magic of the experience, but conquering these multidimensional obstacles makes you feel like a genius.
Simultaneously a game anyone can play yet a title revered by the veterans of the puzzle genre, Cocoon soars through sci-fi planetary plains with a simple control scheme but a mystifying central mechanic that keeps you hooked. Clocking in also at a 5-hour playtime, it’s the perfect title for a one-night binge or to play in between your uni time that still keeps your brain at maximum efficiency. The ‘world within a world’ idea has been tried and tested many times over, but only in such a seemingly simple game has it seen such masterfully fun execution. If that’s too soft a sell, its also published by the same studio as Outer Wilds: yeah, it’s that good.
4.5/5
