A very interesting puzzle game with a brilliant main mechanic. You play as a bug that finds these colorful spheres that you can carry and use to solve puzzles. These spheres however are full worlds themselves that you can enter at specific points in the game. You can also enter a sphere/world while you carry another sphere so basically you put a world inside a world. It sounds confusing in theory, but makes perfect sense while you're playing it.
For the first 3/4 of the game the puzzles are mostly simple and the majority of them feel kind of independent from the world-within-world mechanism. However in the last hour the creativity explodes, the game goes full on with the worlds idea and you have to think outside the box to finish it.
This is actually my only complaint with the game, it's too short. It took me around 4 hours to finish it and it felt that it ended just when things started to get really interesting. The main idea is so cool and I feel they could have explored it more.

I'm also not the biggest fan of the art direction. It's a bit too blocky and random for my taste, sometimes it feels like there are random weird things on screen. The soundtrack was pretty good though.

Overall this is a great puzzle game that I would definitely recommend. I just wish there was more of it.

Cocoon is that calm and peaceful game. Made by the same creators as Inside, it is a very complex and very fun puzzle game. The puzzles involve you venturing into different worlds, where you can carry them inside crystal balls. It's that type of game that doesn't explain anything about the story, however, we know that's not the focus. The game delivers what it promises, the puzzles are incredible and very creative, they make you think and bang your head. In general, I really liked the game, definitely one of the best puzzle games I've ever played.

The best of Cocoon is back-loaded, so you do have to make your way through some okay puzzles before you get to the good stuff.

Pros
1. Everything is so slick. All the animations (jumping in and out of orbs, opening up orb stations, upgrading orbs, all the different kinds of doors, elevators, etc) are exquisite.
2. Using the different orb's powers and upgrading them. The drip feed of new mechanics and combining them in satisfying ways.
3. The puzzle design progressively gets more interesting as new mechanics are introduced and expanded upon.
4. The sound design is phenomenal. The sound of depositing and picking up orbs. So good! I love that stuff. There is so much attention to detail. Moving through the grass and walking over the different surfaces all add subtle auditory details.
5. Something I found out while playing was that the music will change once you are on the right track and are about to solve a puzzle. I didn't even notice it at first, but after many instances, it was clear that they were giving a subtle nod to the player that they were going to solve it. It was simply brilliant. It felt like they were in your head, going "Yep, you're doing it correctly. Keep going!" I feel like I saw something similar in the game Creaks, but I may be misremembering. Another great game with generative audio.
6. Its presentation is gorgeous. I'm often caught off guard by how immaculate Cocoon looks. It's truly ensconced in stylistic flourishes that stop me in my tracks. It's a masterclass in visual design.

Cons
1. Orb backtracking gets tedious at points.
2. I wish the puzzles were more difficult.
3. I wish the story had more substance. It's the vaguest of Jeppe Carlson's games. With Limbo and Inside, I could speculate about their stories and meanings, but with Cocoon I don't have much to go on. You're running through the remnants of some dormant civilization. The ending was showing a metamorphosis or something. It wasn't very compelling.
4. The secret ending wasn’t worth the extreme effort required to pull it off.
5. Its boss fight design isn't that inspired and relies upon the design of many other games.

I think using the hidden and dormant guardian areas would have been a good place to add more difficult and optional puzzles for those inclined. That would have satisfied both camps: Those who just want a flow-like puzzler with little friction and those who want optional difficult puzzles. Maybe that is what they would have done, but ran out of time to implement them. That may have been the case since at least one guardian did have a puzzle attached to its activation.

I'll start with some of the more positive stuff before delving into the puzzle mechanics of the game, which I can tell you, I didn't find complex enough.

The game is pretty, or at least that's what I imagined when playing it on the switch, because it was frame dropping everywhere, and changing from one ball to another would always cause a big skip. The game even crashed at one point. The beauty of the game comes instead from the usage of colour and the atmospheric environments, filled with alien structures and geometric patterns (Geometric Interactive? Hello?).

Now, let's get to the meat of the game. I was told this was a puzzle game, but for the first hour and a half there is nothing more than busywork. The red ball is the most boring of them all, only giving you the power to pass through the orange bridges, and a good amount of this first half is spent doing just that. Navigating bridges does not require thought, just go forward and press every button. Then there's the green ball, which funnily enough presents more interesting puzzles by itself than when combined with the red one and being asked to use the game's main gimmick.

Unfortunately, the shallowness of handling multiple balls is not fixed by introducing more of them. After "solving" the inside of a ball, it is reduced to a box. You will be stuck in some kind of hub area with a couple ball holders, until you get the ability that lets you move towards the new hub, after some navigation. You may place balls inside this box, and move it. There is no interaction with the outside world, which does not care in the slightest what there is inside of the box you are carrying. During this first 1h 30m, I was thinking hard about how could they possibly provide this system with any depth, and the thing is, they just can't. In the future though, the introduction of some more "dishonest" mechanics does give some of this much needed complexity.

Why am I making emphasis on the 1h 30m mark? Well, up until this point, there isn't a single one of the stations that allow you to go inside a ball, inside another ball. For what is almost half the play-time, the main gimmick of the game just doesn't appear, being able to go only 1 ball deep. During all this time, the game is just juggling balls, leaving them "outside" when you don't need them, and bringing them inside when you do, as if using some kind of overly complicated Hold button from tetris. Even when allowed to go 2 balls deep, my previous paragraph still applies. The top level world is simply replaced by the new world.

Finally I will talk about how the game just doesn't leave any space for incorrect paths. Of course, that you can't leave balls behind and mess up your save is good (except there was a puzzle near the end where I swear you could do that?). What I'm refering to is the fact that the mechanics being so simple aren't helped by limiting your options to being able to drop balls only in specific spots, and go inside or outside a ball on designated points. It just leaves so few possibilities that the solution may as well be a straight line: just press every button, drop your ball on every pedestal, and the game does the thinking for you. It will go as far as suddenly closing bridges or putting up walls breaking up interconnected areas, just so you don't try to go back for the ball you left behind.

Anyway what saves the game is that I found some puzzles around the 95% mark to have interesting ideas. In general, most of the good puzzles have little to do with the hopping inside balls gimmick, and are simply related to the powers of the balls.

Cocoon is a ‘visual spectacle’ puzzle game in the Limbo and Inside lineage, with an inventive high concept: the game is built upon a series of discrete worlds which can be miniaturized and contained within one another like Russian nesting dolls. The player is cast as a kind of planet-stacking dung beety, ferrying swamp planets into forest planets into desert planets. Hopping inside of a world holding a different world in tow with the intention of taking something from that different world into an altogether third world is a fun parlor trick.

Cocoon didn’t do much for me beyond that. I like it fine enough, but it’s not a particularly thought-provoking experience. There is a compelling visual language at play, in which the sort of scale of the world vs. the scale of the bug-like player character are constantly at an inverse with their real-world equivalents, which calls to mind the way a game like Everything visually demonstrates that the microscopic world of bacteria is as infinitely vast as the macroscopic world of star systems. But Cocoon doesn’t develop beyond that in the way that a game like Inside does. Inside is initially as broad, but it reaches a conclusion, and in doing so is able to convey specific themes and ideas. Cocoon seems more interested in executing on the fundamentals of a puzzle game, but its puzzles aren’t particularly novel, and much of what the game has to offer is contained within the first hour of play.

It’s been gnawing at me that I must be missing something, considering all the high praise Cocoon has received. Cocoon cracked quite a few Game of the Year lists, but critics who’ve covered it don’t seem interested in exploring what the game is actually saying or doing. Most criticism I’ve read about Cocoon begin with superlatives about each major part of the game’s design and end with basic descriptions of how legible the game’s breadcrumbs are, how effortlessly it can lead the player towards the solutions to its problems, and how smart the player will feel once they’ve been made to solve those puzzles.

This last point, that Cocoon is supremely legible as a puzzle game, doesn’t necessarily do anything for me, in the abstract. In the broadest possible sense, I don’t think padding the ego of the player is a good instinct; it doesn’t produce an experience that matters. Puzzle games are not drugs that are supposed to make you feel smarter than you are, they’re interactive narrative objects like anything else, and pretending otherwise means you’re doing the game design equivalent of a Sudoku puzzle – or, if they are meant to give you a space where you can pretend you’re smart, then they’re meaningless. But hey, Myst made me feel incredibly stupid and I thought it was maybe the most interesting puzzle game I’d ever played, so, take what I say with a grain of salt, I guess.

The moment-to-moment gameplay of Cocoon is context-free video game stuff. Fighting boss battles with bomb-tossing spore-monsters and shepherding robots onto control pads doesn’t express very much about that macro-level part of the narrative. The reason why I prefer Inside, a game that’s functionally a predecessor to Cocoon, is that its imagery and mechanics told its story. The greyscale cubicle farm workplaces, the antagonistic security guards, the police dogs, the discovery of the mind control mechanic that enables the player to remake corpses into dutiful workers – all of these things paint a sharper picture of corporate dehumanization, layers of violence and domination disguised as a society. There is an emotional arc to that game, a reason to care about and to think about what you’re seeing and why you’re seeing it. Cocoon is a game that uses the core design tenants of something like Inside, it seems interested in producing that initial sense of intrigue, only to do less with more.

Cara... simplesmente perfeito, Pqp.

Arte, trilha e os puzzles, muito lindo!

Crise existencial depois de zerar.

Great and unique puzzle game. This game really respects you but that doesn't mean its cruel or punishing. Everything you need you have. Other puzzle games can feel like they are using tricks or a lack of information in order to confuse you. Making it feel like a puzzle, but this game is for real puzzles the whole way through. The aesthetics are creative and beautiful. While the plot is almost unintelligible (strictly because there is no dialogue at all) I still got it and I think most people will. Great game highly recommend. The main character is mad chill too.

This game is incredibly slick. The puzzles flow seamlessly into each other and every part of the world has been designed so that you never have access to more than you need to solve the puzzle immediately in front of you. Its all really brilliantly put together, puzzle design at its most accessible. But in being so well put together it is almost too smooth.

Cocoon was designed by Jeppe Carlsen, best known for his work on Limbo and Inside. What’s interesting about Cocoon is while it appears very different from those games at the outset, it ends up sharing lots of dna. The camera never cuts, flowing through and around pieces of the world as you navigate, your characters verbs are simple, and most importantly, you never stop moving forward. Cocoon is filled with “aha!” moments, but i can count on one hand the number of times i actually got stuck. It does this in the interest of keeping you moving forward but in doing so i find the whole game also flows together in my mind. Those points where i got stuck end up being the only parts i can really strongly remember, the rest of the game slipping through my fingers like sand. The world itself is gorgeous, and the sound design truly evocative. The puzzles are well paced and it doesn’t overstay its welcome, but i expect the gameplay itself to be something i largely forget about in the coming years.

Cocoon is a truly singular experience, unlike anything ive ever played, but its a puzzle game without any room for player expression. Its a game where solving a puzzle often feels more like connecting the dots than discovering a solution. Here are your blocks, here are your sockets, please plug the blocks into the sockets in the only way they can possibly be plugged in, well done, proceed. You get more friction in the final section of the game, but then its over, and im left kind of wanting more, but also feeling like any more complexity would start becoming more annoying than fun as juggling all the orbs starts to get a bit tedious once you have four of them. Ultimately, i enjoyed my time with cocoon, and its aesthetic trappings will likely stick with me for a long time. I just wish the game had been willing to take the training wheels off sooner.