Fluid, simple, responsive. COCOON He is that person that in jargon we would define as "a mine", too intelligent and fast to blend in with the crowd. He is the best in the class, but without spending all day reading. He is, above all, a treasure of game design. The idea of Jeppe Carlsen, former lead game designer of LIMBO and INSIDE, managed to find a very fine balance, but how robust, how resistant! - and create a puzzle adventure capable of projecting the player into an almost meditative state.
There are no texts, there are no dialogues, but the COCOON scenarios manage to speak of a world that has transcended humanity to project our species towards something profoundly different. But all this is secondary to the gameplay, to the need that Carlsen and the rest of the team feel to put the game in its noblest sense at the center. Because COCOON manages to create a magic circle of incredible coherence, a system of unwritten rules assimilated naturally by the player. So much so that, sometimes, we are the ones who have the impression of leading this joyful, but very rigorous, dance between worlds.
Let's find out more about this masterpiece of game design in ours. COCOON review.
Out of the cocoon
COCOON shows that it wants to get straight to the point from the first lines. He begins with a beam of light that hits a mysterious cocoon and forces it to open. Out comes our silent protagonist, a humanoid-beetle that moves with lightness and grace in the environments created by Geometric Interactive. We are not told about the presence of a precise mission: the only thing left is to move forward and discover what the sunny desert in which we have woken up will have in store for us.
The result is aextremely natural and spontaneous exploration, without tutorials or on-screen interfaces of any kind. The subtraction work carried out by the team is admirable, who did not want to leave space for even the slightest intrusion between the player and the protagonist of the adventure. There are only two options: move or use the action button. We said it at the beginning: COCOON is a simple game. Which is not to say that it is a trivial game at all; If anything, the opposite is true.
This simplicity is also reflected in the narrative setting. In the approximately five to six hours it took to complete the adventure, we enjoyed the great silence by COCOON, which entrusts the stages with the task of telling the story of an ancient civilization and its decline. Only at the end will we understand something more concrete, but telling a complex story is not the goal that the team has set for itself. We would like to point out the presence of a secret ending: the developers have communicated to us their desire to modify it with a patch that will be inserted into the game on launch day, but we do not have precise details about it.
Dancing between worlds
The aspect that caught our attention the most about COCOON in our tests at the Summer Game Fest and in the different trailers that have taken place over the years is undoubtedly the gameplay mechanics. jump between worlds. Perhaps not fully exploited by recent games that have also implemented it, such as Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, in the work of Geometric Interactive this element becomes the cornerstone of the entire experience, also being surprising from a technical point of view.
In fact, we said that COCOON is fluid and reactive: this dance within a colorful matryoshka of different worlds is always stimulating, precise and fast. To continue you have to go back and forth through spheres. Each one of them contains its own universe. And also a boss: once defeated, we can unlock a specific power associated with the sphere. The battles against these monsters - the only ones present in the game - are also enigmas: the humanoid beetle that we control has no real offensive options available, and we will have to take advantage of what the environment offers us to take advantage of the weak points of majestic opponents. they turn out fun and challenging fights, in several phases, and with very elegant genius, the team has decided not to insert a finished game: the boss will simply kick us out of his world, projecting us beyond it without much ceremony.
Moving through the worlds of COCOON is something that involves intelligence, more than intuition: it will be enough to carefully analyze the options we have at our disposal to find the answer to each problem, in an extremely natural way. If it is perhaps true that near the end there is a slight weakening of this impeccable structure - a couple of passages could have been more concise - it is also true that COCOON's enigmas, at least to a large extent, present a simple and rigorous logic. It is enough to tiptoe around Occam's razor: the elements should not be multiplied more than necessary, and it is enough to observe the problem firmly to discover that the solution is within reach.
Universes in succession
Il COCOON worlds design is capable of giving everyone a feeling of uniqueness, both from a visual point of view and in terms of gameplay. We go from desert universes to expanses submerged by water, passing through biomechanical terrain in which spheres must be inserted into disturbing casings. The visual character of the production is always consistent with itself, with a surprising use of color and lighting of the environments. From time to time we will find ourselves cooperating with some robots that will help us open doors and unlock new paths, but COCOON turns out to be a solitary adventure within a world that is often eerily silent, as if its mysteries were lurking in the shadows, somewhere. .
The characterization of the worlds also goes through i. powers associated with the spheres and it is unlocked, as we said before, by facing the bosses. To give an example relating to the first stages of the adventure, the balloon that encloses the desert world is capable of giving substance to hidden and previously incorporeal paths: its red light is, therefore, capable of guiding us towards new paths. To continue, it is necessary to use the abilities of the spheres at the right time, managing them carefully: they are not consumables, but they must be carried around the worlds, in such a way that they are always available when needed. - and making sure to always keep in mind its objectives, effects and its characteristics.
COCOON is able to put the player in a state of flow easily thanks to the nature of its puzzles, which fully respect the user's intelligence, and also thanks to the music by Jakob Schmid, co-founder of Geometric Interactive together with Jeppe Carlsen. Never intrusive, always capable of constructing an elegant union - sometimes in direct dialogue - between diegetic and extradiegetic sounds, they transmit the idea of a distant future in which the human has been integrated in mysterious ways with the non-human.
However, elegance and synthesis are the true leitmotiv of this production, also flawless from a technical point of view in our PC test. We would like to point out that the menu texts are completely translated into Spanish Language.
Conclusions
Tested version PC with Windows digital delivery Steam Price 22.99 € Holygamerz.com 9.0 Readers (57) 8.5 your voteCOCOON is the demonstration of how elegance is always born from simplicity and a clear idea of what one is. COCOON is not an adventure with a strong narrative traction; does not want to put violent dynamics at the center of the game; does not push the player to rack his brain for hours on seemingly unsolvable puzzles. COCOON is a work that is reduced to the basics and, for that reason, it wins; It is an elegant dance between worlds, capable of never being cloying; It is an experience that focuses on the purely animal ability to analyze the environment and what is available to find an efficient solution in any situation. It's work that would be appreciated by Donna Haraway, a philosopher who preaches man's co-conversion with other species as the only way to save our dying world. COCOON's humanoid beetle is the hero of our difficult times, and is the protagonist of one of the brightest video games of this rich 2023.
PRO
- Flawless puzzle design
- The world jump mechanic is implemented perfectly.
- Technically solid
- Artistically magnificent to see and hear.
AGAINST
- Some final passages are slightly diluted.
