Cocoon Review (Zet)
COCOON is a fantastic game that I have been looking forward to since the minute it was announced and I am happy to let you know that my expectations were met and exceeded and if you don't want to read any further, I can not recommend this game enough!
I have always been a huge fan of Jeppe Carlsen's work. LIMBO and INSIDE by Playdead are both excellent games, but also his lesser known solo work, 140 and THOTH are terrific in their own right. If you have played the latter, you might remember my name from one of the achievements. I even had the honor of meeting Jeppe Carlsen, Jakob Schmid and some other (ex-)Playdead folk and I still cherish the memories of that night.
When I heard that Carlsen had left Playdead to start his own studio, I was sad on one hand, because I had valued his puzzle design of their games as feeling integral to the world. But on the other hand, I felt excited for what was to come.
Knowing Carlsen's work well, I expected this game to put a huge emphasis on game feel and intuitive player guidance with excellent sound design and music integration. And this is pretty much what I got, but I did not, even after watching the trailers, expect this game to look so absolutely gorgeous all of the time on screen.
The game controls nice and fluid, everything can be done with eight directions and a single button. If you play on controller, you have analog movement controls but your character's idle animation can only appear in said eight directions. The music is more calm and atmospheric but there are occasional intense sections in the soundtrack, fitting the action on screen.
What really boggles my mind is the puzzle design. Knowing Carlsen, I did not expect any less, but the way in which mechanics are introduced to the player, consecutively in didactically designed challenges to the point where it feels completely natural to come up with the solution for the next puzzle made me speechless. There was never a time in the game where I felt lost or stuck, I always had the drive forward but at the same time, the puzzles always provided the right amount of challenge to me and did not seem trivial to solve.
There are very few very, very minor nitpicks that I still feel obliged to state here. The game starts with a "cold start" opening which is always cool, but from the player perspective, specifically on PC not always the best, since it prevents players from checking the game’s settings. As a result, the game started, at least for me, in 1080p and 60fps despite my monitor supporting 1440p 144fps and these gorgeous graphics deserve the crispest resolution you can offer them. The other slight issue I found was that some more frequent actions needed a held button press which felt just a tiny tad too long for my taste, to the point where I felt a slight bit of annoyance when I needed to do them often in succession. But as I said, these are absolute minor nitpicks, and the graphics options in the cold start can hopefully be fixed in a future patch.
Other than that, I have absolutely nothing negative to say about this game. Its length and dramaturgical development with environmental storytelling combined with gameplay make for definitely the most compelling experience, by far, I've had with any game I played this year.
Very highly recommended.