I needed a short game I could smoke in a couple of sessions, and Game Pass had this on offer. Given all the praise it's gotten and the low time to complete - a bit under four hours for me, at the end - this seemed like a decent pick.

I'm a bit baffled by the If A Play Was Only A Series of Chekhov's Guns approach to puzzle design. Far from red herrings, Cocoon removes all possible distraction at every opportunity. Instead, the solution is usually obvious almost immediately and it's a question of shuffling your available orbs around in the right sequence. Usually this involves some tame yet tedious traversal through what I'll admit are well-rendered - though at points sort of biologically grotesque - environments. A few puzzles have some light timing elements, but once the shooty orb came into play it made me want something a bit more like CrossCode's dungeon design, with more responsive pieces rather than beautiful. The boss encounters are good but each share a critical flaw - the timing of the effect of special "orb" in each fight varies by fight, and there's only the one button, so you will likely get launched back out once or twice getting a handle for the wind-up timing (you get a chance to use it to wake the boss up, but exact timing matters a lot here as all of the bosses are tighter timing puzzles than anything else). This could have been avoided by introducing the ability you use a bit earlier on in some sort of disposable fashion, but this smells like something that was cut, like the final orb shuffling puzzle not including the purple orb's special ability, or they tried it and it didn't flow with the rest of the experience.

I wouldn't recommend against playing this, but I have a hard time recommending it, either. At the very least, even if you find it as... blah? as I did, it won't eat up much of your time.