Playing Cocoon at Summer Games Fest last weekend, the prevailing thought that was stuck in my🃏 head the entire time was “Inside-like”. Though stylistically very different, it offers the same kind of meditative and melancholy experience that’s 💧both beautiful and unsettling.
The short demo gives a strong sense of Cocoon’s unconventional narrative, which is told experientially rather than through normal exposition like cutscenes and dialogue - a signature of Limbo and Inside. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Cocoon comes fro♑m a new studio founded by Jepee Carlsen, lead gameplay designer of both games. Apparently you can take the developer out of Playdead, but you can’t take the Playdead out of the developer.
Cocoon is an isometric puzzle adventu꧃re game set in a refreshingly unique alien world. You play as a robotic beetle on an unexplained mission, using orbs to solve puzzles and journey… somewhere. Like Carlsen’s previous games, Cocoon elevates environmental storytelling to be its primary narrative device. You can only start to understand where you are and what’s going on by paying attention to details and clues in the world around you, and even then it seems much is left open to interpretation. Cocoon’s world is filled with harsh industrial environments and organic alien structures that morph and blend together into biomechanical devices, and it seems the machine-like bug you play as is somehow a product of that confluence.
Other than moving around, Cocoon is a single button game. You use the interact button to press switches, pull and push objects, and eventually, to pick up and put down orbs. The first orb you find, a shiny peach-colored ball that yo๊u carry on your back, becomes your constant companion. You use it to activate pressure switches and roll it through tunnels to solve puzzles, but you always have to go back for it, and it never goes too far away. Eventually you find out where the orb belongs: an enormous, earthshaking machine that seems to draw power - or deliver power - to the orange ball. Here is where Cocoon delivers its ‘aha’ moment. The orb you’ve been carrying around and bonding with contains an entire world, and you can go inside of it.
Of course, as soon as you do, you find another orb. Cocoon’s world-within-worlds structure quickly leads to some mind-bending puzzles that involve moving back and forth between worlds and shifting the layer around by carrying orbs into and back out of them. By the demo’s end I was juggling three separate orbs and trying to keep track of which world was currently contained within each one. I know intellectually that what’s going on under the hood of Cocoon probably isn&rsquo♐;t as complicated as they make it look, but jumping in and out of each world never ceased to amaze me.
The demo only has time to hint at all the interesting opportunities for unique puzzles this mechanic creates. One puzzle features a moving laser that you can’t walk through, so you have to jump out of the orb, then jump back in once the laser has passed. If you look closely, you can still see the laser moving when you look into the orb after you’ve jumped out of it. It’s just enough of a tease for things to co🗹me that it makes me excited to see 🌞what other kind of clever world-leaping tricks they’ve come up with.
I often worry about cool indie games finding an audience, but with the backing of beloved publishers like Annapurna Interactive and the pedigree of Limbo and Inside, I doubt Cocoon will have trouble getting attention when it launches this year. It’s better to be safe than sorry though, so maybeꦛ go ahead and right now, then go plജay Inside again.