Nearly flawless. I have played games that made me feel smart, and games that I thought were smart, but this is perhaps the first time solving a puzzle felt cool. Cocoon is sick, slick, and everything I want games to be by being nothing I hate about how games are.
There is no language. There is no tutorializing. There is one action button. The pause menu is beautifully vacant. There are only puzzles, set in increasingly lavish environments, that breeze by concepts that could by themselves sustain entire game-lengths of reconfigurations.
Cocoon has mechanics, but writing about them feels nonsensical in a uniquely video-game way, (complementary). I put Cocoon in the same realm as Thumper or Pac Man, where the elements that form the game's world and interactivity do not need to be explained or understood outside of how the player interacts with them. I will shoot anyone who says that Cocoon has Lore™ and write the word ~Aesthetic~ in bullets across their chest.
Know that my first instinct is to stop writing here, because the game is short, and wonderful, and you should just play it instead of having anyone else try to describe it. It exists in a world without words, and words will ruin it. But I want to say more nice things about a good game since I rarely like anything this much - we're only a week into 2024 and I already like it better than anything I played in 2023, recency bias be damned.
Every level can be contained in a marble. You can jump into a marble and explore its world. You can take a marble and bring it into another marble. Carrying a marble grants one extra ability with the press of the action button. This at once turns every marble into a game map, a lock, a key, a power-up, a parking lot, and luggage.
There is a unique feeling of zen and oneness as you become familiar with the ways all these relationships fit together. One that was confirmed for me when this game's "level select" screen, available upon the game's completion, described your position in the game by what percentage through your journey any instance represented. Although levels have "backtracking", returning to a marble always means seeing more than you were able to encounter before, and the nature of Cocoon's design eliminates ambiguity of where you should be. Everything is connected in a way that gives Cocoon such amazing thematic coherence while also being often unintelligible to describe.
Normally I hate collectibles, and the extra hallways they coax developers to create to house them. In Cocoon, the sparse and easily missable alternate paths make sense to me as ways to keep your mind looking for alternate interpretations of your environment. Even though Cocoon is a delightfully linear progression, there is enough renegotiation of how spaces fit together that I welcome the mere suggestion that the straight way forward is not the only way to think.
The boss battles felt a little out of place, but I still enjoyed them. Each one used a new marble ability never used again elsewhere in the game, little bite sized reflex-based puzzles to punctuate the end of a world. With no health system and no life system, even a failed attempt made me laugh, as getting bested by a boss meant being thrown out of that marble's world altogether. Sometimes presentation is everything for effecting your mindset.
Without its surrealist cosmic bug theming, Cocoon could have functionally been the same, but wouldn't have the same soul. There is something inherently fun about a small worker bug carrying a world carrying worlds on its back. I love his playful and jaunty gait, the way he bounces under the weight of his load. His wings vibrating when he can interact with contextual switches, their size making it easy to read which way he's facing - it's all such good game character design.
4.5 stars at A+ rank is rare for me, and even I question what is holding me back from giving it full marks. Once it was firing on all cylinders, pulling twists and inversions that surprised and delighted, I simultaneously wanted more while becoming aware how the game was straining to end with grace. Maybe I'll change my score with more time to let the game settle. Absolutely phenomenal, I'll play any mediocre clone I can get my hands on.
There is no language. There is no tutorializing. There is one action button. The pause menu is beautifully vacant. There are only puzzles, set in increasingly lavish environments, that breeze by concepts that could by themselves sustain entire game-lengths of reconfigurations.
Cocoon has mechanics, but writing about them feels nonsensical in a uniquely video-game way, (complementary). I put Cocoon in the same realm as Thumper or Pac Man, where the elements that form the game's world and interactivity do not need to be explained or understood outside of how the player interacts with them. I will shoot anyone who says that Cocoon has Lore™ and write the word ~Aesthetic~ in bullets across their chest.
Know that my first instinct is to stop writing here, because the game is short, and wonderful, and you should just play it instead of having anyone else try to describe it. It exists in a world without words, and words will ruin it. But I want to say more nice things about a good game since I rarely like anything this much - we're only a week into 2024 and I already like it better than anything I played in 2023, recency bias be damned.
Every level can be contained in a marble. You can jump into a marble and explore its world. You can take a marble and bring it into another marble. Carrying a marble grants one extra ability with the press of the action button. This at once turns every marble into a game map, a lock, a key, a power-up, a parking lot, and luggage.
There is a unique feeling of zen and oneness as you become familiar with the ways all these relationships fit together. One that was confirmed for me when this game's "level select" screen, available upon the game's completion, described your position in the game by what percentage through your journey any instance represented. Although levels have "backtracking", returning to a marble always means seeing more than you were able to encounter before, and the nature of Cocoon's design eliminates ambiguity of where you should be. Everything is connected in a way that gives Cocoon such amazing thematic coherence while also being often unintelligible to describe.
Normally I hate collectibles, and the extra hallways they coax developers to create to house them. In Cocoon, the sparse and easily missable alternate paths make sense to me as ways to keep your mind looking for alternate interpretations of your environment. Even though Cocoon is a delightfully linear progression, there is enough renegotiation of how spaces fit together that I welcome the mere suggestion that the straight way forward is not the only way to think.
The boss battles felt a little out of place, but I still enjoyed them. Each one used a new marble ability never used again elsewhere in the game, little bite sized reflex-based puzzles to punctuate the end of a world. With no health system and no life system, even a failed attempt made me laugh, as getting bested by a boss meant being thrown out of that marble's world altogether. Sometimes presentation is everything for effecting your mindset.
Without its surrealist cosmic bug theming, Cocoon could have functionally been the same, but wouldn't have the same soul. There is something inherently fun about a small worker bug carrying a world carrying worlds on its back. I love his playful and jaunty gait, the way he bounces under the weight of his load. His wings vibrating when he can interact with contextual switches, their size making it easy to read which way he's facing - it's all such good game character design.
4.5 stars at A+ rank is rare for me, and even I question what is holding me back from giving it full marks. Once it was firing on all cylinders, pulling twists and inversions that surprised and delighted, I simultaneously wanted more while becoming aware how the game was straining to end with grace. Maybe I'll change my score with more time to let the game settle. Absolutely phenomenal, I'll play any mediocre clone I can get my hands on.