Cocoon review: A daring indie adventure full of elaborate puzzles

Cocoon is a daring new indie adventure filled with beautifully elaborate puzzles, albeit with a rather formulaic story attached. 

It seems that for Geometric Interactive, the creators behind Cocoon, the mantra show, don’t tell has been fully emblazoned in their brain as the mind behind LIMBO and Inside, two of the 2010’s most unique puzzle platformers, have created yet another impossibly unique puzzler. 

The indie studio was founded by former Playdead employee Jeppe Carlsen and audio programmer of INSIDE Jakob Schmid, and it seems Playdead’s design philosophy has rubbed off on Carlsen. A voiceless story that digs deep into the human condition, an innovative approach to puzzles, and visuals that beg to be admired rather than serve as mere background images.

Cocoon looks to build off Carlsen’s work with LIMBO and Inside, which showcased some of video games’ greatest attempts at show, don’t tell when it comes to creating stories for the medium. Cocoon succeeds in that, with some of the most innovative puzzle gameplay out right now, and visuals that stun, albeit with an incredibly basic story attached to it. 

Cocoon – Key Details

• Price: $24.99
• Developer: Geometric Interactive 
• Release Date: September 29, 2023
• Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PS4

Cocoon – Trailer 

Fundamentals of puzzle games executed perfectly 

From the days of The Oregon Trail to today’s Baldurs Gate 3, there’s one incredibly basic mechanic every single video game will need to have. You move, and you interact. That is arguably the most basic fundamental of every single video game throughout history. 

The folks at Geometric have taken this to the max as Cocoon literally has two controls, you move with your joystick and you press X (or A if it’s an Xbox controller) to interact. It reminds me of Swans’ album To Be Kind, or the works of Mark Rothko. Pair your art form down to its absolute fundamentals and create the largest piece of art you can with just that. 

Cocoon absolutely excels in this regard.

Cocoon’s puzzles have you shifting between worlds, traversing alien-like landscapes in which you traverse your surroundings by picking up orbs and rearranging them to solve intricate puzzles. 

Each new orb confronts you with a new guardian to face off against. And each world introduces a new mechanic. As the game progresses, it slowly utilizes every single mechanic that it has shown off, from the interaction of rearranging orbs and interacting with machines to shifting between worlds. It all becomes increasingly elaborate.

And with each world’s puzzles solved and its lands traversed, it culminates in a “boss battle” against said guardians, akin to Fury’s boss battles. Somehow, just using the basics of movement and interaction, Geometric Interactive turns the game from a puzzle to a full-on bullet hell excellence.

The “boss battles” see you dodging shots and timing your “attacks” (which have you either dropping orbs onto a boss or forcing them to ram into an object) in the right window, very much akin to bullet hell games. And just like any bullet hell-esque title, once you screw up, you restart from the beginning until you find the right pattern.

Cocoon, somehow only utilizing the core mechanics of what makes a video game, moving and interacting, has not only created an incredibly intricate puzzle game, they, at times, transform the puzzle game into a quasi-bullet hell experience and it’s all the better for doing so.

Otherworldly visuals alienate

Visually, Cocoon takes inspiration from the most alien of creatures on earth, insects (it also explains the name). From our character’s design to the design of the guardians and the environment we traverse, it all screams insect.

And we say alien because that’s what Geometric has billed the game as, a sci-fi alien adventure. Other than the orbs, nothing in this game looks remotely Earthly. From the bridges that are either made out of light or seemingly caul fat, to structures that look like they were either built out of the exoskeleton of a bug or the insides of a human being, nothing is quite familiar here.

Cocoon is visually unique and conceptually looks unlike any other game I’ve ever played. Even the most alien and sci-fi games out there can’t touch how otherworldly Cocoon’s environments are. 

Cocoon’s visual design does what it so clearly wants to do, alienate you. To plop you down in a world where you simply have no idea how it came to be, with design concepts far removed from anything humanly that you can think of. All the while creeping you out, yet intriguing you enough to explore.

Show, don’t Tell formula has a few hiccups 

Show, don’t tell. That is the story philosophy the studio seems to have built its game around. It worked for INSIDE and Limbo, why can’t it work for Cocoon? 

Where INSIDE and Limbo both have environments that resemble very real human fears of depression and the removal of human autonomy, which allows both games to never tell their story but show it, Cocoon’s visual storytelling falls short in that regard.

Cocoon’s story is akin to every other average indie puzzle/platform game. We play as a character who is dropped into a world, we explore the world, solving its puzzles, we interact with its big baddies, and it all culminates in a big confrontation of the big bad which is changing the world for the worse to right the wrongs, with sprinkles of The Hero’s journey all over it. 

Cocoon’s story unfortunately leaves more to be desired. It attempts to tell its story through visual means, and it basically succeeds in that as I never once felt like I was lost in it. However, because of how foreign its visuals are, despite being incredibly well executed, it was a struggle to find anything deeper to the story like Limbo and INSIDE. 

As a result, it was hard to form emotional connections to beings and environments that felt so alien. And as a game devoid of texts outside of the menu screens and with zero dialogue, it made it nearly impossible to grow emotionally attached.

Verdict 4/5

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. 

Reviewed on PC