‘Cocoon’ Review: A World-Warping Wonder

As someone with an insect phobia, exploring the world—or more accurately, worlds—of Cocoon began as one of the most subtly unsettling experiences I’ve seen out of games in some time. It’s a place equal parts reminiscent of the Shimmer from Alex Garland’s adaptation of Annihilation and the organic lifeforms that sprout in any number of Björk music videos. Throughout, you’re harnessing the building blocks that make up the natural world, though here they’ve been warped into something vaguely familiar yet demonstrably alien. This is the world within worlds that Cocoon’s player character, a cicada-like creature, is birthed into.

Over the course of Cocoon’s short play time, you wander those worlds solving puzzles, pushing forward as you unravel the mysteries that are laced into the landscapes. In the process you find out just how quickly one can adapt to any environment. That’s a feat of wordless narrative design that every puzzle game developer breaks their brains in half trying to achieve, and yet Cocoon makes it feel so effortless and organic. Despite the fleshy, squelching, biomechanical nature of the game’s biomes, there’s an obvious elegance at work here, a simplicity to the solutions that has the ironic effect of making them easy to overthink.

Then again, the player’s focus is pulling in a whole different direction than it normally does. It’s obvious through the construction of some of the switch-based puzzles that Cocoon is the brainchild of several key figures who developed Limbo and Inside, but there’s a brand new twist to consider: The biome you start in actually exists inside of an orange orb.

After finding and activating a strange alien launching pad, your character grows large enough to take that first world/orb and carry it on their shoulders, using the platforms that the orb reveals to traverse a new environment until you find a green orb containing a different biome, which can be entered—and with the orange orb in hand to traverse the environment within. The green orb, which turns gases into solid and vice versa, contains a purple one with its own powers, and on and on, until the player is performing a recursive interdimensional juggling act that dwarfs even recent world-warping wonders like Viewfinder and Maquette in their creativity.

Somehow, instead of being confusing and unwieldy, each new obstacle hits that sweet spot of making the player feel empowered instead of making the developers look smart, though they most certainly are. Cocoon, as a feat of game design, is an astonishing piece of work, forcing the player to evolve, to grow more observant, and to respect the laws of the natural world.

Every step of the way is littered with details big and small that absolutely sing, from the way that you can see the solution for a problem reflected in a puddle at your feet, to the ways the aphids and fireflies floating through these strange new worlds coalesce into funny little helpers along the way. Even with a phobia of everything this world was made to embody, it’s hard to not become transfixed by the beauty and enormity of it all.

This game was reviewed with code provided by fortyseven communications.