Cocoon (Xbox Series X)
In Cocoon, you find yourself carrying entire worlds with you, and while this starts off mostly as a novelty, soon you’ll come to see that these worlds you hold can interact in a variety of unique yet intuitive ways.
Cocoon begins seemingly with your creation, a bug-like being emerging and setting out into the first of the worlds you’ll come to know quite well over the course of this puzzle game. There are no words to be found outside of areas like the pause menu, the game even relying on you to intuit its controls, but early on the game shows that even with its complex sounding puzzle concept things can be kept rather approachable. Your character can normally only do two things of note, carry and drop orbs and interact with things beneath your feet like panels or portals. Both are managed by pressing A and your wings even quiver when you’re near something you can interact with, but as you explore the red wastes of the first area, you quickly learn what things can be interacted with and the game makes sure the new mechanics that added are all easily apparent, quickly managed, and have a clear scope.
Cocoon is by no means minimalist, each world exhibiting its own theme so they stand apart. With areas like the marshy green world or the odd purple world where structures are more organic, an interesting relationship between technology and living things means the worlds are intriguing to look at but often nearly ethereal and eerie as you explore spaces you don’t quite know the history behind yet they feel like part of a wider world. However, despite the game trying to make sure its worlds are fascinating to look at, you aren’t going to get thrown off the trail of a puzzle solution because of it. When your progress is blocked, there are often only as many interactive objects in the area as necessary for nearby puzzles or the rare optional secret to the side. Cocoon is smart in locking off areas so you don’t backtrack thinking you missed something unless you actually did, and since your options for interaction are limited, you can start to thin down potential solutions in your head. This ends up allowing Cocoon to get more clever with what is in play, the player needing to consider environmental clues or the way different objects can interact with each other, something that becomes far more interesting the deeper you get in because over time you’ll gain access to more and more worlds you can hop between seamlessly.
When you find specific pedestals to put the world globes on, a puddle forms beneath to serve as a portal to that world. Leaping from one environment to the other is done fluidly so you can have puzzles reasonably take place across the different worlds, the player sometimes needing to bring one world orb into the other to properly activate systems and engage with the strange technology you uncover. At first this most often manifests as trying to figure out how to move spheres around barriers so you can keep carrying them to their destinations, but each world also has a being protecting it you need to overcome to unlock that place’s true potential. Cocoon is usually free of any danger or combat, but when you come face to face with these guardians, they take the form of proper boss battles that are your first, only, and yet still fairly involved engagement with a unique mechanic. Whether it’s flying around a boss arena with a water jet or swapping places with a little indicator that mirrors your movements, these fights try to get mileage out of their unique trick, these feeling like more active puzzle solving tests much of the time and only made a little less interesting to engage with by the fact the boss can throw you out of its world if it grabs you, forcing a full restart of a fight that sometimes can last a fair bit.
Overcome the boss creature though and you’ll unlock the true potential of the world they presided over. Now rather than being basically just a large weight to activate switches and such, a world orb also features some new ability like revealing hidden ground or firing an energy pellet. These aspects of the worlds become a new tool in puzzle solving and add another layer of complexity, but even when you’ve reached the full potential of all the world orbs and are shuffling them in and out of each other to make their powers interact, Cocoon remains manageable because it doesn’t throw in extraneous pieces to distract you from the task at hand. The game doesn’t want you bumbling around the worlds confused so locking off sections helps restrict your focus, but the puzzle design isn’t too straightforward that limiting your options will lead to easy puzzle solving. Oftentimes when a new device, power, or element is thrown into the mix, you get your first puzzle where it’s easy to engage with, then one that looks almost the same but suddenly threw in a light complication that asks you to consider how other elements can be used in tandem with it.
Cocoon is able to provide those moments where suddenly things click without it feeling like you were pushed to a solution. Even when you’re struggling with a puzzle in the area, you often know exactly what you can do and just need to figure out how to pull it off, some puzzles having some time-based elements and a few late game sections get a bit demanding in being quick to act, but most of the time there is going to be wiggle room so if you have figured out what to do you can enact your plan and move along without much hassle. The game doesn’t run out of new ways to engage with your carried worlds and gets particularly inventive near the end with how the worlds can actually interact with each other, but even when you see a recurring idea like a little drone that follows you to unlock gates, its puzzles don’t feel similar because you’re still having to concoct new ways to escort it or utilize new mechanics to successfully help it reach its destinations. Cocoon never felt so easy that it was mindless nor did it dish out headscratchers that make you tempted to reach for a walkthrough online, even its toughest puzzles mostly requiring a bit more orb shuffling or reading environmental clues properly. The logic remains sound and solving the puzzles isn’t a matter of guesswork, the ability to progress always something you earn so it in turn feels rewarding to progress.
THE VERDICT: Cocoon crafts strange ethereal worlds where you couldn’t hope to understand how they came to be, and yet these same places host remarkably intuitive and creative puzzles with ease. Even when you’re hopping between multiple worlds and have a range of strange powers to tap into, Cocoon keeps the scope of each individual puzzle precise so you don’t get frustrated considering it yet there’s enough room that interpreting the clues and solving things is still a satisfying and personal process. The boss encounters are a bit of a strange mix of being too slow while requiring quicker movement than most of the game, but even they are meant to test your ability to figure out limited variables that don’t at all feel basic despite the seemingly complex pitch of this game involving puzzle solving across multiple worlds at once.
And so, I give Cocoon for Xbox Series X…
A GREAT rating. While the boss battles in Cocoon aren’t quite as clean when it comes to serving as tests of your problem solving ability, the rest of the game feels almost masterful in knowing how much to keep in play without ever handing you so much that puzzle solving becomes automatic. With multiple worlds eventually in play it could have very easily become tedious to hop between them trying to work out where things go and there was definitely potential for things to get too intricate, but Cocoon has a good degree of control over the scope of its puzzles so that you can pick up on what’s important and what isn’t so you don’t waste time jumping between dimensions without purpose. The game does start to reveal its most creative interactions between worlds as the ending starts approaching and you are left wishing it could have gone even further, you never have anything as drastic as one world encroaching on the other when it could have been interesting to have something like the swampy waters pouring into the red wastes as a puzzle solving tool. Keeping them distinct likely helped the game keep its clean flow though, the player never trapped for too long because they learn the way things function early on and new elements are introduced in smart ways to prevent you from being overwhelmed. There are still clever and unique constructions where you take worlds into each other or utilize their powers in special ways, all while the game didn’t have to sacrifice any visual splendor because you are trained early on to know the difference between decor and an interactive object. Perhaps boss battles that were portrayed more like trials than actual combat would allow their form of puzzle solving to still work without leading to the few moments of potential repetition in a game that otherwise can move at a pretty clean pace even when you do need some time to meditate on a puzzle. Once you understand a normal puzzle it’s often quick enough to execute your plan or test a theory, Cocoon doling out satisfying tests of your problem solving after training you up through smaller and manageable tests so you’re not often going to find yourself slowed down by wall after wall of complicated conundrums.
Cocoon definitely impresses visually with the seamless way you can quickly hop between multiple diverse settings and instantly get to work in each one, but even its simplest puzzles are structurally sound either as teaching tools or as little trials that are entertaining to overcome because there’s enough to work out even when they don’t involve one of the game’s more involved world hopping solutions. Cocoon can have its unique concepts of interactions and avoid frustrating players because it places things so expertly, the unusual and ethereal worlds providing incredibly intuitive play that makes your mind feel sharp instead of fatigued afterwards.