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 limit.
The 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.
3.5