Cocoon
Played the whole thing over the weekend and I am please to offer my most highest recommendation for what is at the moment my GOTY.
Folks, I needed this game. Before Friday I didn't touch my Playstation for a couple of weeks, not having the give-a-shit to deal with Armored Core's seizure enducing gameplay, Baldur's Gate 3's Excel spreadsheet busy work, or Street Fighter 6's thumb-breaking advanced mechanics. These are great beloved games that I just can't even with personally. My heart was crying out for simplicity, dare I say purity.
The marketing for Cocoon crowed about it being "from the makers of Limbo and Inside" and I like those games, but was kind of weary of the schtick half-way through Inside already. The early reviews for Cocoon intrigued me by talking about the game not having any dialogue at all (not even text) and only one interaction button. Plus it's colorful and cute (one of the reasons I got tired of Inside and Little Nightmares is squinting at the darkness).
Cocoon is "video game" distilled to its bare necessities and it is all the more glorious for it. You are a bug-like creature and you go around figuring out how to get from place to place. Yes they are "puzzles" but they don't feel like puzzles so much to me. I tend to stay away from puzzle games because I often don't know if I get stuck because I can't figure out the solution, or the solution is unfair, or it requires mechanical dexterity that I am failing at, and being stuck between those three disparate trains of thought is an unpleasant and frustrating experience.
Cocoon avoids that by imbuing its micro-level and macro-world design with great intensity and focus, and offering almost no manual dexterity gameplay challenges. In fact, in the rare instances where the latter does come up, I got angry because it was so out of step with the rest of the game. But that was literally 2x so I got over myself.
I think this game is not for everybody. Many games are praised for allowing the player to solve problems their own way, or have multiple solutions. Cocoon has one solution for every problem- it forces you to meet the world on its terms, not yours. Of course this only works if the world design is absolutely brilliant which it is. The perfect combination of visual simplicity and recursive complexity as you progress results in a feeling of absolute delight as you solve each little puzzle. If you're the type of player that likes to "break" things and work around solutions, then you will not get that here. This is a game for those of us that like to be wowed and impressed.
Some games get traction by people sharing their own stories. Baldur's Gate 3 is of course the king of this right now- I used this, I figured it out that way, etc. Cocoon isn't that- your play-through will be the same as mine. It just feels pretty ballsy to me now to put out a game that will succeed if the story people tell each other is "I played it and it was good" the end.
The other reason it might not be for everyone is that it's rather easy, I think. So if you're a puzzle game veteran you'll blow through this game in 3 hours. I am not so I didn't.
The key gimmick is that the game world is really like 5 sort of connected worlds or dimensions, and you can literally carry those worlds around as a ball and also use the ball to unlock stuff. Of course the game builds on that starting you in just one world but after a couple of hours you'll find yourself thinking like "well if I have the white ball firing pellets into the orange world which has the black diamond, do I hold it from the left side in the purple world, let's try that.. oh damn I left the green world in the white world lemme go get that first" and such.
Now if that sounds kind of insane, the way the game mitigates this is by sort of railroading you. Areas lock behind you, jumping platforms are one-way only, so everything you need is always within reach. And without any bullshit obfuscation techniques like cryptic verbal messages, blurry special effects or absence of light, you have only your brain, eyes, and faith in the game design. I was never like "oh no do I screw myself out of a solution because I have to go back to the beginning for an hour" or whatever.
There are even boss fights, but those are just faster puzzles, really, and they are delightful.
My love for this game largely revolves around what it lacks:
- Menus
- Inventories
- Talking (now, I do love my cut scenes in cinematics in Sony/AssCreed/etc games, but this isn't that). I mean none of that NES/PC era text scrolling across telling you about a great evil blah blah... because..
- Nostalgia. It's indy and cute but has nothing to do with Zelda or Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy or even Limbo (other than the vague "you're in a cool but weird and a little creepy world"). It's its own thing.
- Tutorials. I mean it's just direction and interaction, why you need a tutorial lol
- Jumping
This last one is extraordinary to me. Like every game has some sort of jumping so the first thing I do when encountering an obstacle is to jump at it. If there's a puzzle solution that requires transporting your character you have to figure out if you gotta jump and when and where exactly and did you jump right or I am even supposed to be jumping and this game doesn't have time for that noise.
Playing this game, I giggled and gasped in delight like a child. I think maybe one reason for all this indy nostalgia stuff is people wanna feel like kids again but that stuff just makes me feel old. Cocoon made me feel like I imagine I must have when I played Space Panic on Coleco Vision or A Link to the Past on SNES.
I should say I'm in a bit of a minimalist/purist groove in all my art/media appreciation and consumption and man did this game hit my right where I'm at. Absolutely lovely experience and if you're thinking about it, do it.
When some walkthroughs or guides come out, I will replay it in order to get all the optional collectibles (there are only a few and found some but not all) and also to just appreciate how the whole game works now that I discovered its secrets on my own, both for platinum and to just revel in its beauty.
