Cocoon

• Genre: Puzzle Adventure
• Time Played: Somewhere between 5-10 Hours
• Too Short/Long: Alright for what it is and I'm torn whether I wanted more or if more would have made it felt like it dragged on. I feel like It's probably solid if you do all the bonus stuff.
• Pleased/Disappointed: I'm pretty pleased, it offered a relatively new experience.
• Why I played: I've been hearing a bunch about this game since it came out and some of the mechanics in trailers and such looked pretty interesting.
• Recommend to others: Yes? Maybe? I don't not recommend it. But it's a weird game and until I got around the ~60% mark I had no idea what I was even doing most of the time. But I liked it and if you like weirdo puzzle games go for it.

Cocoon is a weird game. I can't tell if it's genius game design or deceptive game design, but for a large portion of the game I just felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I was along for the ride and the environmental puzzles were my mode of transport. I felt like I was on auto-pilot just going from place to place and I can't tell if it's because the puzzles are just that intuitive or if this is just a walking simulator disguised as a puzzle game.

I want to say it's the former. I want to say there is just some amazing game design at play that combines a unique gameplay experience with zero narrative outside the visual context as you play and intuitive design that has you solving puzzles in the moment-to-moment as you encounter them.

It wasn't until I was probably further than 80% through the game that I had had to stop what I was doing for even a moment to think "How does this work...oh!" and even those moments were short, it often took longer to put the ideas in practice than to consider them.

There are also a couple "action" like sequences with the boss fights, but even those are more about solving and performing the action, so it's not enough to put this game into action territory, but those were fun, and I honestly expected more, but that's not what they were doing for this game. It at least helps break up the game a little bit and act as marker of progression.

It was a pretty good game though. You can put a world inside a world and then put that world inside itself, and that's pretty neat.