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.

OneShot

• Genre: Puzzle Adventure
• Time Played: 8 Hours
• Too Short/Long: Pretty much just right. I would have enjoyed a deeper dive into some of the puzzle mechanics though.
• Pleased/Disappointed: It was pretty good, I was pleased with it.
• Why I played: I had been wanting to play it for some time, it looks really cute. I never got it on Steam, and kept flip flopping on getting on Switch, because technically I already had it from an itch.io bundle. You can't really play OneShot on the Steamdeck... I eventually just caved and sat at my computer to play a game, which took a lot from me.
• Recommend to others: Only if you really like digging deeper into what games have to offer as at face value. This game does some of the grunt work by literally telling you what you need to do at times. I think it pulls off some of it in pretty clever ways. I appreciate it, but it's not for everyone. Thankfully, I think the Switch version builds 100% of it into the game, so it might be the better option for most people.

OneShot is another one of those games that it's better to go in not knowing much... except, I don't think it really matters all too much, I never got the feeling the game was taking itself too seriously or that any kind of spoiler was going to ruin the experience. Either way, I'll err on the side of caution. It's pretty accessible and while it has some fun puzzles and such, more of it is pretty easy stuff presented in the style of old pc adventure games where you have to actually access your inventory and choose an item to use that is a appropriate for the situation, but the vast majority of the game is just going where you need to in order to progress. It's more about the journey than the trials and tribulations thereof. You just have to be willing to think outside the box from time to time.

To that effect, it does it's job and offers some innovative ways of messing with the game. Perhaps my main complaint is it doesn't do it enough? If you play through the "full game", the second half offers far fewer puzzles, only a couple the entire playthrough and doesn't really expand much on some of the introduced elements. I think they could have come up with a lot more clever ideas using some of the tricks they introduced, but overall it's a small game made by a few people, so I'm not complaining. I enjoyed it and it choked me up a bit at the end.

Void Stranger

• Genre: Puzzle Adventure
• Time Played: 61 hours.
• Too Short/Long: Too long... buuuut also it might be my own fault. If you want to see all the game has to offer it's too long. If you're fine with missing some content, it's probably not.
• Pleased/Disappointed: I was originally disappointed that System Erasure's follow up to ZeroRanger was going to be a puzzle game, I am no longer disappointed.
• Why I played: It might have been a long time til I played this game if not made by the same people who did ZeroRanger, which is one of my most favorite games in recent years. It being a puzzle game, but having cute style pixel art with big character drawings, I would have likely added it to my wish list, maybe bought it on sale and maybe gotten around to it some day. As I do for most game fitting the description.
• Recommend to others: This is a weird one. This is probably one of the games I've liked and played the most, I will recommend the least. While I think it's a great game, I find it very hard to recommend to anyone who wouldn't play it with dedication and determination. Not only are some of the puzzles ridiculously hard, but some of the secrets are extremely secret and it's the type of game you have to dig and dig at just to get a morsel of a reward for your effort.

Void Stranger is a puzzle game where you progress through levels by moving the floor tiles to get to the exit. You're often navigating through an otherwise bottomless pit and often have to avoid or manipulate monsters positions as well. The game does a good job at playing with and introducing layers to those mechanics, but on the surface level it's a pretty straightforward puzzle game. It's everything around the floor-to-floor puzzles that make the game really stand out.