The phrase "I'm gonna take my ball and go home!" went through my head on more than one occassion while playing this game.
It's funny, the plot beats and the overall narrative are very vague, so in my head I gave voices to all the various life forms and probably turned the whole thing into a way more comedic experience than was probably intended. Though the narrative vagueness might have been expected, given that Jeppe Carlsen (who was the lead for this) worked on both Limbo and Inside.
It's a good thing that I managed to click way more with the gameplay aspects of Cocoon than I did with either of the previously mentioned games. There is something to be said for puzzle design which feels so elegantly and meticulously crafted - there were plenty of opportunities where the game could have gotten extremely messy with dangling puzzle threads left unfinished that you come back to later, which in other games might cause you to meander about searching for the solution. That doesn't happen in Cocoon, where the play area is smartly limited so you can focus on one thing at a time.
The puzzles start pretty small in scope, but gradually increase to encompass larger areas. But even so, I never felt like I was at a loss for what to do for very long. Every time I got stuck, I would quickly go over the puzzle's play area and make a mental note of every potential puzzle piece, and sometimes I had to stare at a thing for a minute or two until a solution came to me in a eureka-moment.
I don't want to give away too much when it comes to mechanics, but suffice to say that the game successfully managed to blow my mind, especially towards the end. There were some (to me, at least) pretty complicated concepts to wrap my mind around, and damn if I didn't feel like a genius every time I solved one of those puzzles.
It's funny, the plot beats and the overall narrative are very vague, so in my head I gave voices to all the various life forms and probably turned the whole thing into a way more comedic experience than was probably intended. Though the narrative vagueness might have been expected, given that Jeppe Carlsen (who was the lead for this) worked on both Limbo and Inside.
It's a good thing that I managed to click way more with the gameplay aspects of Cocoon than I did with either of the previously mentioned games. There is something to be said for puzzle design which feels so elegantly and meticulously crafted - there were plenty of opportunities where the game could have gotten extremely messy with dangling puzzle threads left unfinished that you come back to later, which in other games might cause you to meander about searching for the solution. That doesn't happen in Cocoon, where the play area is smartly limited so you can focus on one thing at a time.
The puzzles start pretty small in scope, but gradually increase to encompass larger areas. But even so, I never felt like I was at a loss for what to do for very long. Every time I got stuck, I would quickly go over the puzzle's play area and make a mental note of every potential puzzle piece, and sometimes I had to stare at a thing for a minute or two until a solution came to me in a eureka-moment.
I don't want to give away too much when it comes to mechanics, but suffice to say that the game successfully managed to blow my mind, especially towards the end. There were some (to me, at least) pretty complicated concepts to wrap my mind around, and damn if I didn't feel like a genius every time I solved one of those puzzles.