The closest to a negative thing I can say about COCOON is that I wish there were more of it. I wish I could forget everything I know about it so that I could experience it again for the first time. That those moments of jaw-dropping awe could hit as hard as they did my first time through. While I can’t have those moments back, though, you can still experience them. If you haven’t played COCOON yet, they’re still waiting for you to find them.
Cocoon is a deeply special game that gushes with expertise from the talented minds that programmed it. By constantly expanding upon the unique mechanic of layered world-hopping, players are gifted with an absolute darling of a puzzle game. Cocoon is one that is rarely meant to stump with obtuse solutions, instead becoming a constantly evolving challenge that travels through spectacular alien worlds and rewarding moments. I never wish to be lost in puzzle games, merely wrapped up. Cocoon is a metamorphosis, one to be gladly wrapped in.
The puzzles are simply extraordinary. It's a very enjoyable game that you can finish in a long day playing or just a few hours per day. They did a great work here. Highly recommended.
Cocoon, as the name suggests, is a game about self-evolution. From the moment you emerge from the womb-like structure at the game's beginning, pushing forward and learning are your primary focuses--even if what you're ultimately accomplishing feels a bit unclear. But it's also about how the self is but a small part of life--how entire worlds can fit in an insect's tarsal segments. From its puzzles to its visuals, Cocoon is a beautiful game filled with brilliance and meaning, delivered in a subtle yet unforgettable way.
Cocoon is one to remember. This puzzle adventure builds on ideas from Limbo and Inside and creates a mind-bending, world-warping adventure unlike either of them.
If you feel longing for something like INSIDE, Journey or ICO, then drop everything and just buy Cocoon. It's one of the most important games this year, and one that will be talked about years down the line.
Despite the stumbles of show, don’t tell making Cocoon’s story harder to get invested in as a whole, what kept me hooked was its incredible gameplay and visuals. With every new game mechanic or world I explored, it just kept impressing me to the point I was able to overlook its weaker story.
While it may not fully capitalize on the draw of its main premise, satisfying puzzle design, boss encounters and that simplest pleasure of seeing your character hop into and out of worlds on a whim lends Cocoon well-warranted and ultimately long-lasting charm.
Cocoon, a thought-provoking game, invites players to embark on a journey of self-discovery and existential inquiry. Through its innovative gameplay mechanics and surreal landscapes, the game critiques the human condition, echoing philosophers like Sartre and Heidegger.
The "cocooning" mechanic represents the human desire for control and agency, nodding to Sartre's "bad faith." As players navigate the dreamlike realms, they confront the consequences of their actions, illustrating Heidegger's "Being-in-the-world" and the responsibility that comes with freedom.
What sets Cocoon apart is its masterful blend of innovative gameplay and stunning visuals. The game's clever use of perspective-shifting and environmental puzzles creates a sense of wonder and discovery, immersing players in its mystical world. The vibrant, dreamlike art style, reminiscent of surrealist masterpieces, perfectly complements the game's philosophical themes, creating a truly unforgettable experience.
By overcoming the game's clever challenges, players assert their agency and create their own meaning, illustrating existentialist principles. Cocoon's exploration of identity and selfhood critiques conformity, echoing Heidegger's "The They." With its unique gameplay and captivating visuals, Cocoon presents a profound philosophical exploration of the human condition, encouraging players to confront existence, freedom, and responsibility.
The game looks beautiful, but I felt bored. I liked solving puzzles in Limbo, previous game of the developer, but in this game I didn't enjoy it so much
It was pretty good. Interesting and unusual puzzles, with some physics to discover. I liked how it was forgiving in that you didn’t have to remember your exact path back, as paths tend to lead back to known places. The recursion got tricky but not impossible.
Cocoon is a simplistic puzzle game with very vague stakes. You play as some sort of humanoid insect person, and you are solving puzzles. The central conceit of the game is that you are jumping between worlds, with each world contained in an orb. Place these orbs on certain places, and you can jump into the world inside of them; there are bouncy platforms in each world which will launch you out of the world back to the main world.
This is a one-button game; you have directional controls, and you have an action button, which lets you pick up a sphere, place it on a designated position (you can’t drop them wherever you want, you have to put them on stands), activate things in the environment, and activate your currently carried sphere’s special power once you unlock it.
While this seems very simple – and it is – the game manages to do a number of quite clever things with it, leading to increasingly clever puzzles as you unlock more and more of the spheres. As you get more of them, you have to do ever more elaborate puzzles involving jumping between spheres and manipulating them to get across obstacles, and by the end of it, it has added some additional ways of getting between spheres that further increases the game’s ability to use these simple mechanics and push them to their **** game’s puzzles are actually quite clever overall, and I think that the game did some interesting things with them – this is one of the best games that involves nothing more complicated than moving things around, and the visuals of jumping between worlds are quite cool.
However, while the game’s puzzles are pretty clever overall, it’s not Portal; this is a pretty mechanically simple game, and while it ends up making the puzzles work pretty well, I honestly don’t know why this game is so hyped up. It’s definitely a decent puzzle game, but I didn’t feel like the puzzles were as clever as they were in, say, The Talos Principle 2; the game’s puzzles are all pretty simple and straightforward, and while there are some clever bits in there, you’re unlikely to ever get stuck, as the game is very deliberate in limiting the number of options, which helps you to find the solution as there’s only a small possibility space.
That said, if you do like puzzles, it’s certainly clever enough.
The game, rather unexpectedly, has boss fights as well; there’s not a huge number of them, but they work well enough, and they help mix things up and add a bit of action-based excitement. If you get caught by the boss, you get chucked up out of the sphere you’re inside, allowing you to go back in and go fight the boss again, and none of them are overly difficult or long. It works pretty well, and once you figure out that there are bosses, you have something to look forward to, as beating them is what unlocks the sphere’s special powers, leading to some new puzzles.
Overall, the gameplay works well enough, and I thought it was quite decent; the game also knew it didn’t have TOO many ideas, so it kept things short, with a 100% play time of under 6 hours – in fact, it was likely under 5 hours, as I spent some time chatting to friends while playing.
On the other hand, story wise, this game is very, very weak indeed. You are some sort of humanoid insect, but what your agenda is – what your purpose in doing the things you’re doing – is never really made clear, and this isn’t the kind of game that has audio logs or any sort of text descriptions in it. There’s honestly very little if any story to speak of, and while I think that the creators had some ideas in this regard, the game does a poor job of communicating them. As such, if you are a more narrative-focused player, you will find literally nothing here – go play Portal or The Talos Principle.
Overall, this is a very decent puzzle game, and worth playing if you like the genre – but I feel like the 88 metacritic score makes this seem like a really amazing game, but I thought it was merely quite decent for what it was, but nothing that I think you’re missing out if you never play it. I liked my time with this game well enough, and if you like puzzle games, you probably will too – but it’s a good game, not a great one. Go in with that expectation in mind, and you’ll probably come away satisfied; go in expecting this to be the puzzle game of the year, though, and you probably won’t find it to quite reach those heights.
I'm surprised at all the glowing reviews for this game. I found myself mostly bored while playing it and there are only a few challenging puzzles. There are boss fights to change up the pace, but those can be incredibly frustrating since they are so slow paced and if you mess up once, you have to start all over. The art style was also a miss for me and felt kind of generic, but that's definately subjective. In a weird way, this game reminds me of Scorn, where it seems like it's relying heavily on the art style and atmosphere to capture your attention rather than the puzzles. It does have some interesting ideas, like the concept of carrying around different worlds and having different layers of environments you can teleport into, but I feel like it didn't really do anything interesting with the concept. It's a very short game (around 3 hours or so to complete) and if you have Gamepass it's probably worth checking out.
SummaryFrom Jeppe Carlsen, the lead gameplay designer of LIMBO and INSIDE - COCOON takes you on an adventure across worlds within worlds. Master world-leaping mechanics to unravel a cosmic mystery.
COCOON is a unique take on the puzzle adventure genre, where each world exists within an orb that you can carry on your back. Wrap your head arou...