How ‘Cocoon’ Is A Game That’s Its Own Worst Enemy
Like surely everyone else, Cocoon crossed my radar due to the strong impressions that its creators made with Limbo and Inside. I hadn’t even watched a trailer but I had wishlisted it all the same just because of the feelings those two prior games left me with. I was delighted to receive a copy of Cocoon in our annual Epilogue Gaming Secret Santa event this year, and I proceeded to queue up Cocoon on my Steam Deck. Having completed all of the game’s achievements, I still feel like the best things I can say about Cocoon take the form of damning with faint praise. Simply put, Cocoon is not as special as Inside – but could anything be?
I’ve written at length about Inside and why I think it’s an incredibly successful, borderline masterpiece, game. But the singular thing I think Inside nails so well is tone. It accomplishes its masterful command of tone through a carefully constructed atmosphere, puzzles that feed into that atmosphere, and an unforgettable conclusion that casts an uncanny light backwards on the game, making you reconsider and contextualize your entire experience. Unfortunately, I do not feel like Cocoon does any of those things, but it also doesn’t seem to try very hard in those storytelling and worldbuilding regards.
The Fluid Ambience of Gameplay
The worldbuilding of Cocoon is relatively straightforward. Cocoon is a game that practices wordless storytelling and instruction, where game mechanics are taught by doing, where lessons learned are accumulated through visual examples. As an indie game, it immediately feels small and contained – almost the perfect feel for a Steam Deck. Each area in Cocoon is incredibly intuitive, which could be seen as either overly simplistic design or excellent mechanical instruction. You run around an often pleasant environment with various colored orbs, all of which serve slightly different purposes, and as you explore these environments, you start to see the environments all connect back together like a tiny Souls world.
The structure of Cocoon is a simple formula that the rest of the game follows: explore around until you encounter a puzzle, solve the puzzle by doing some environmental reasoning, reach the new level’s boss, defeat them, and repeat. I think this simplicity had moments where it worked well for me, and others where it made this rather short game feel longer than it needed to be. For example, I think the orb puzzles are an overall success of the game. They require you to think on multiple physical planes at once while simultaneously accounting for their unique abilities. The orange orb, for instance, allows your character to traverse invisible bridges and pathways. This relationship to the orbs starts incredibly simple but quickly becomes a puzzle version of the film Inception.
The beautiful thing about the orb puzzles is their complexity. The game does a fantastic job of giving you time to learn how each orb works, and then gradually introducing the idea that these orbs can work together in concert. The white orb, for instance, can be placed in turrets that you will find later in the game. These turrets, when loaded with the orb, will fire off projectiles. At first, the object you need to shoot is directly in front of you; by the end, you’re firing projectiles through other spheres, timing mirrors, warping between worlds, and so on.
This complexity becomes beautiful insofar that I never once hit a roadblock for more than a minute or two with any of the game’s puzzles. In fact, the game’s learning slope was almost imperceptibly flat until the final hour of the game. This meant I felt capable and engaged by the mechanics and never frustrated, like a labyrinth you find on the back of a kid’s menu at a restaurant. There wasn’t a moment where I put my Steam Deck in rest mode so I could mull over a puzzle or look up a walkthrough. The only two things I felt compelled to look up while playing were the locations of Moon Ancestors (which unlock achievements when you free them) and the game’s final puzzle. Mostly, I was kind of done with Cocoon by the finale, so the idea of saving the most intricate puzzle for last was something I lacked the patience for.
Repetition and Roteness
Despite the smooth design that felt rather frictionless, I think the downfall of this game’s structure is its repetition. There’s very little in Cocoon that you don’t have to do a few dozen times. Whether it’s something a little rarer like drone puzzles or something incredibly common like warping between worlds, there was a fatigue that set in about halfway through. Everything in Cocoon becomes rote, and I don’t think that’s a strength. I think the game designers recognized this player fatigue was a possibility, hence the inclusion of boss fights throughout the experience.
Honestly, I was rather surprised that this game decided to include boss fights at all. Outside of these chapter-closing arena fights, there is no combat to the game whatsoever. In fact, I don’t think there’s even the possibility of dying or losing progress in the game. Sort of like Chicory: A Colorful Tale, though, I felt like the inclusion of the boss fights elevated the experience for me. While they are all incredibly simple, and the worst that can happen is that you get thrown from the game world and have to start the fight over, they still add some needed tension to an experience that I otherwise experienced as a vague fluid ambience.
What I liked about the boss fights was how they tested you on the orb you’ve most recently been using to work through the previous level’s environment. I think the clear standout fight is also ironically the one that fell into the trap that seems to plague the rest of Cocoon’s design: roteness. You will, for instance, encounter the final boss multiple times. Because the creature abducts your orbs, you are tasked with working without them, fighting the boss and reclaiming one – rinse and repeat.
Welcome Changes of Pace – But Not Enough of Them
The mechanics of this fight arrive in four distinct waves that feature spinning geometric diamonds that you have to shoot. The first round of this boss is the simplest one, as you’d expect. You start off with two spinning crystals that you have to shoot, which sounds easy, but you have to train your shot ahead of where the object is about to be. You are eventually shooting four crystals and have a rotating barrier that obstructs your shots circling around your character. The stakes of this fight are low, but if you take too long in any phase, your character descends from the encounter and you start it from scratch.
Since you fight this boss multiple times, these boss sequences gradually become more difficult even though they are presented in identical ways. There’s still the same number of rotating crystals, but they start to behave differently. You shoot one, and they all reverse direction; you used to have one barrier but now you have two, etc. By the end of these sequences, there’s something to be said about how well I’d improved my shot timing and accuracy. At the same time, as seems to be the trend for my feelings about Cocoon, there were simply too many of these fights. Even the addition of the Pong-like final parries with this boss lost their impact because of the sheer number of times I had to do them.
Thus, I think the biggest problem with Cocoon arises from things that, in isolation, are otherwise strengths. The orb puzzles made me feel clever, but there were too many of them. The boss fights were a nice change of pace, but they became repetitive. The wordlessness and ambience of the story became emptiness, where there was very little to latch onto to keep me interested in any pretense of narrative. Cocoon lingers too long with each of its design decisions and slips into the crevasse of feeling tropey and predictable.
Lingering Concerns
Unlike almost any other game I have played in the past year, Cocoon is its own worst enemy. Everything about this game screams competence, but at the same time, it’s a game that left practically zero impression on me. Unlike Limbo and Inside, I will not be pondering over the moments in Cocoon, theorizing what they might mean. The final cutscene of the game strongly hints at a greater cosmic significance to the worlds and orbs of the game, but when the credits rolled I was startled: a mixture of “that’s it?” and “thank the gods.”
There are two final lingering thoughts about Cocoon that I want to spend time with, but they are not necessarily about the game itself. Rather, (1) I wonder whether marketing this game off the reputation of Limbo and Inside was a mistake, and (2) I wonder why I still went out of my way to 100% complete the game when I was losing interest during the second half.
To the first concern, I must confess that I was one of the rare players who was underwhelmed by Limbo. Perhaps that’s a consequence of playing Inside first, a game that truly unsettled me and remains one of the most thought-provoking games of my life. But I could at least see how Limbo taught the developers lessons that were streamlined to perfection in Inside. (And who could forget the spider?) Cocoon feels nothing like either game, and so I am almost confused as to why you would want your game’s tagline to rely so heavily on that established reputation – and I can’t point to many examples apart from, say, Balan Wonderworld where a strong reputation diminishes the impact of a game like this. Obviously, the cynic in me looks to the business side of the games industry and knows this is sales-related, but I think it would be a much stronger decision to let the game stand on its own merits. As such, I do not feel like Cocoon lives up to the expectations that most people will have when Inside is invoked.
To the second concern, I have written on several occasions about video games that I thought were too long for their own good like Tales of Arise or The Last of Us: Part II. In these instances, I question why I stick around and finish these titles when I am clearly losing interest or burning out with them. I will not go as far as to say that Cocoon needs to be trimmed down for length – it took me 5.5 hours to do literally everything – but it still evoked that feeling through the concern about roteness that I have expressed above. There’s something psychologically mysterious to me about why I would 100% a game despite not falling in love with it, sticking with something thoroughly when I’m simultaneously trying to figure out if I can still find a way to like it. Whether it’s sunk cost or some strange obsession with raising the number of “Perfect” games in my Steam library, I don’t have this problem with books. If I realize I’m no longer getting something from a book, I put it down; Cocoon was just pleasant enough to never put down, but it’s not a game I’d put on my GoodReads either.
Cocoon is a well made game, but not a game that I think most people will remember. It enters the “not great, not terrible” category. And considering why I picked this game up in the first place, I consider that lack of lasting impression to be a disappointment. I wanted this game to bend my brain, whether from puzzles or narrative, and it never managed to reach either such heights. I wonder what I would have thought about Cocoon if I had considered it in isolation. As such, Cocoon strikes me as a cautionary tale in how much weight to put on your past artistic efforts.
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