Cocoon is the first product from the other half of post-split Playdead Games. The studio responsible for LIMBO and INSIDE broke up a few years ago. One half went off to build Somerville, and the other half started making this.

Somerville was very similar to their past works, a “run left (and sometimes right) simulator”, with body horror, violence, and general weirdness, presented in one continuous bite-sized experience compared to basically all other games.

Cocoon is a significant departure from past works. No body horror, no ultra-violence, all weirdness. Also actual “boss fights”… but that really isn’t the point of the game. This game is 98% puzzles by volume. It reminds me somewhat of what I’ve seen of Patrick’s Parabox, but with far more puzzle variety than just being a Sokoban game.

Cocoon drops you into a 2d isometric world with no explanation. You’re a little bug . . guy . . and you can run around and press one button to interact with things. You eventually find a red orb, which can be placed on pedestals to do things, and can be placed on special pedestals to create a pool that lets you jump into that orb and seamlessly transition into a whole new world to explore.

Which, ok, fine. That’s not mind-obliterating, we’ve been jumping into worlds since Mario 64. But then you work through a bunch of puzzles in that world, “cleanse” your orb, and find you can now do more stuff with it if you hop out a “world” and pick it up.

Still not too insane. But then you get another orb, and start having to do puzzles where you’re juggling which orb you’re taking which orb into, and temporarily parking orbs within other orbs to progress through puzzles.

…and that’s about as far as I’m going to go here because the rest would be black bars.

It’s a short game, you could probably knock it out in an evening or two. Some of the puzzles get seriously hard because they require throwing out a lot of your existing concepts of “places” and “things” when building a mental map of a game, because this is a game where nearly everything about the structure of the world can be moved at will.

Really the most amazing part of this game is just how well it worked. The puzzles require you to do some really bizarre stuff by the end, but it’s all so meticulously designed to not break, and really works perfectly no matter what you do. And they managed to do this without feeling like they put up safety railing everywhere in the game.

If they give you a fork in the road, you can safely go left or right in either order. If you go into an area with a specific puzzle to work on, they’ll throw up a temporary barrier informing you “hey, there’s a thing here you need to complete, and you have everything right here to do it, so don’t worry about going back the way you came”. They also have a thing where once you’ve successfully used an interactive element to do the thing you need it to do, it just melts into the floor indicating you don’t need to worry about it anymore.

Also like their previous works, you can very easily rewind to previous “scenes” in the game, to find bonus hidden optional puzzles. I missed one over the course of my play-through, so cleanup to 100% was super quick and easy.

Highly recommended (if you’re into this kind of game) (which you should be).