Do you like puzzle games that completely mess with your perspective? Do you yearn for worlds that are utterly alien, yet you can see how they'd work internally? Well, we have the game for you! 

COCOON (henceforth stylized as Cocoon for the sake of readability) is a puzzle game from Jeppe Carlsen, the lead gameplay designer of Limbo and Inside. It keeps the puzzle roots of those games, but gives them a surreal twist by allowing you to seamlessly hop in and out of worlds while discovering strange and alien biomes. Let's get into it!

Hatching in a World Within Worlds

The story of Cocoon is... hard to follow. Things start off simple enough, you're a little bug-like creature that just got out of it's cocoon and you start exploring the world. However, it's never really explained what your purpose is, and you, as a player, just push forward because... Well, it's a game.

The worlds (yes, plural, we'll get to that) of Cocoon are very alien, if very barren. There's really no other NPCs to interact with, no wildlife to speak of. Most of the interactable objects are somewhat mechanical, seeming to originate from the same spot, creating a continuity between worlds.

The one exception are the so-called Moon Ancestors, which are beings you awaken when you unlock a new world, and either serve as boss fights or as a collectible. They have a somewhat eldritch aspect to them, with designs and movements which are both abstract and odd. But even they are never really explained: We have no idea why they exist, or even if they are our enemies.


A Moon Ancestor, the kind you need to fight

A Bug's Layered Life

The control scheme for Cocoon is as simple as it gets. You move using the left stick and interact with the world with the A button. There's also an accessibility setting that lets you control your character with either stick or the D-pad, and interact with the world with any of the other buttons/bumpers/triggers.

What "interact" means is going to depend entirely on what you're doing, but for the most part it will involve grabbing stuff or pressing buttons. You'll grab on a switch that will move a piece of terrain it's attached to or make a platform you're standing on move around.


You take a platform for a walk and then you cross it

The main mechanic of the game is what I'll call "orb-hopping". Throughout the game, you'll come across a number of orbs that you can carry on your back. Those are the worlds I mentioned earlier, and you can hop in-and-out of them by using special platforms. The transition effect is quite striking, and hard to describe in text, so here's a gif!


Out of the Desert, into the tech-y place

The feeling I got while orb-hopping was similar to going through my first portal in... uhm, Portal. Even though the mechanics are very different, they evoke the same feeling of pulverizing the concept of linear space. The transitions in Cocoon are also very smooth, with no noticeable lag when going in and out of the orbs.

Out of Place in an Alien World

As mentioned earlier, there are boss fights in this game, and they're a little... out of place. They're very well designed and mechanically sound, but the rest of the game is about take-your-time puzzles, save for a few that test your dexterity, while the boss fights are more closely related to the bullet-hell genre.

You also have to start them from the beginning if you get hit. They're short encounters being only a couple of minutes long, so it's not a big deal, but having to restart when you get knocked out just at the end of the third phase can be infuriating. 


About to fight on a tiny platform, brb.

Defeating one of these bosses will net you a power-up for the orb you were in when you fought them. Something interesting they do is tease the power-up you'll get via either a mechanic the boss has or one you employ during the fight, but then remix it when you actually get it yourself.

For example, the very first boss has the ability to make walls made out of crystals. Once you defeat them, you get the ability to create crystal platforms using the orb. This is true for all of them, though the ability of one of the orbs doesn't get used in the latter half of the game while all the others do, which I found odd.

Aside from going in and out of biomes by yourself, you can also orb-hop while carrying a different one on your back. At one point you even take one orb inside itself, which is quite trippy. You'll use this to solve puzzles by using the abilities of the other orbs, as each of them has unique traversal properties. 

In addition to the orbs, another recurring type of puzzle will involve using a small drone to unlock certain areas. To get this drone, you'll have to walk over some symbols in the ground in a specific order, which is deduced from structures in the environment around it.


Can you see where you have to look for the symbols on the ground?

Once you'll get the drone, there will be certain areas where it'll be captured and you'll have to find a way around it via orb-hopping. At some point, your drone will be "spent" to unlock a door, usually to the boss room, and it won't follow you anymore.

There's only one type of collectible in Cocoon, and that's the aforementioned Moon Ancestors. Different from their boss counterparts, those are just chilling around the world for you to find. They're tucked away off the main path, but you can spot them via some black, goo-y pillars that form around them. They don't affect the ending of the game as far as I can tell, aside from some statues near the end of the game, and you only get an achievement for each one you find.

Progression through the game is fairly linear, and you can't really get lost. The road will constantly get blocked as you solve puzzles, indicating that there's no point in going back. When you're on the right path to solving a puzzle, the music will pick up to let you know, though it's a bit more subtle than that one Zelda tune (you know the one).

Speaking of the end of the game, I won't spoil it here, but it can get pretty existential. The abstractness of the story is kept to the very end, though you start to have a slightly better idea what it's all about. You'll reach that ending in about 4 or 5 hours, so the game is a nice, short experience you can knock out in an afternoon.

Cocoon is available now on Steam, PlayStation, Switch and Xbox for 24.99 USD/22.99 EUR/20.99 GBP or your regional equivalent. It's also available on Game Pass for both PC and Console, and the Steam version as a 20% discount until the 13th of October as of writing. All in all, the game gets a recommendation from us!

What do you think of Cocoon? Will you try to delve into it's odd world? Let us know in the comments below!