This article contains spoilers for an early puzzle in Cocoon.
Cocoon is the kind of game that makes it tempting to reach for a guide. But in my three hours with the indie puzzler so far, I've found that it rewards sitting with its stumpers until you start to see its world the way it wants you to. Even if, initially, they look unsolvable.
In the new adventure game from Jeppe Carlsen, lead gameplay designer of Playdead's Limbo and Inside, you play as a little bug creature wandering a top-down world and solving puzzles as you go. The game has an interesting tension going right off the bat as it drops you into its world and lets you explore in any direction, which gives it a sense of freedom. But then you’ll get to a new area and rocky gates will emerge from the ground behind you, sealing you in. Until you solve the puzzle in front of you🀅, you’re not getting out. It’s like wandering the woods and𝄹 then getting stuck in a bear trap.
Cocoon Is Definitely Going To Be The Ne🎐xt🔴 Inside
Cﷺocoon is a new game from the lead designer of Limbo and Inside that perfectly captures what made both games great.
I mean that as a positive, I promise. But it is an odd feeling to get to grips with. After enj🦩oying a bit of exploration, I was annoyed when this happened to me for the first time — especially because I had a hard time understanding the puzzle I was suddenly confronted by. I had stumbled into an open-air area with cliffs on all sides, except where the path, now blocked, led up to it. To the left, there was a tower that I could raise and lower by pulling a uvula-like appendage in a semicircle groove surrounding it.
To the right, a series of black antennae emerged from the ground, each terminating in a different shape. One was an upside down triangle, another was a circle with a slash through it. If you walked near them, they would light up, changing from black to white. Near most of the antennae, there were e🦩tchings in the sand depicting symbols, some of which also appeared on a circular sketch on the ground nearby.
I looked at this for a long time, puzzling over what it all meant. I tried matching the symbols in the circle to the symbols by the antennae, but they didn’t match up completely. I tried hitting the antenna in a variety of different orders, some l🌳ogical, some brutally forceful. I walked over to the uvula lever thing and tried pulling it back and forth to see if it did anything other than raise and lower the tower. It didn’t. I was stumped and, due to the game’s open-closed structure, I couldn&rsqu🥂o;t leave.
So I kept tooling around, trying to sync my brain up with the game. I had been looking at the a🐼rea as a bear trap, but here I tried to reimagine it as a hot tub I needed to soak in.
I played around with the tower some more, raising and lowering it. That was when it happened. On each side of the tower, there was a small symbol scrawled in white paint. This hadn’t meant anything to me when I first started, but now I recognized that the symbols matched the symbols at the end of the antennae. Quickly, I pulled the tower as far to the left as it would go, then hit the antennae that matched the paint on the side. I pulled it to the center, revealing a new symbol, and did it again. I pulled it all the way to the right and did it once more, releasing a floating golden ball from behind the antennae. It flew over the circular sketch and broke into a bunch of yellow shards, hatching a little drone. It flew behind me and, as I approached the gate, the rocks lowered back into the ground. I was frꦍee.
There isn’t anything wrong with reaching for a guide. They’ve helped me complete games I wouldn’t have finished without their help, and explained things I wouldn’t have understood (and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:TheGamer has a bunch of great ones). As I make my way through 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur’s Gate 3, an extremely complex game with a lot of moving parts that aren’t always explained well, guides have been essenti♚al. But, Cocoon is built on figuring things out,💫 getting on its wavelength. Understanding a complex game can sometimes feel like trying to read a poorly written instruction manual. Cocoon asks you to learn a new language.