This week, Xbox Game Pass released a game on day one that has the potential to be on quite a few Game of the Year lists. Cocoon is a wonderful gem of a game and deserves as many players as possible.
Cocoon is a pretty unassuming puzzle game. At first. The opening shot pulls out on cocoon splitting open, wings protruding until a small moth-like creature drops out. You're suddenly standing in a gorgeous pastel world.
The game tells you nothing and you have to rely on your instincts. You'll quickly figure out there's a button to jump and another to interact within the world. Telling you nothing is an ongoing thing - there's no dialogue and cutscenes are relatively vague - you can eke out a story of your own choosing. It adds to a mystique the game slowly builds over time, which isn't a surprise as the game comes from the lead gameplay designer on Limbo and Inside.
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Each environment feels incredibly alien; trees and plants probe outwards with bizarre tendrils, each area is brimming with insect-like appendages or intersecting structures like the carapace of a beetle. They're unsettling, but not to a horrific degree. Everything feels otherworldly.
On paper, Cocoon is a puzzle game that uses orbs to warp in and out of different, colour-coded worlds. These orbs can be carried and 'used', or placed in a fountain-type structure to allow our moth hero to fly into that world.
For example, the orange orb is a desert world, the green is filled with swamps. Not only that, but each world orb features a particular power or ability needed to solve puzzles. Orange allows you to walk across invisible bridges, green conjures pillars in specific areas to reach high points. These orbs act like pocket universes, places where you can drop off orbs to carry more than one at a time.
As the game progresses, the orbs must be used in combination or stacked within each other to solve more devious puzzles. Any example I could give would utterly spoil certain sections, but to say that these puzzles, once solved, made me feel like a genius, is fair. Later puzzles require multilayered thinking, juggling the orbs, switching them back and forth to travel into worlds within worlds. Think Christopher Nolan's Inception, but with moths.
When the credits rolled I found myself sitting in awe of what I just played. Cocoon is not only a visually stunning game, with an aesthetic that bridges a gap between watercolour painting and vector-based cartoons; but it's a fiendish journey that scratches areas in your brain that you didn't even know you had.
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The last time I played a puzzle adventure like this, one that left me this impressed, was probably Fez. Or Braid. Both games that subvert traditional puzzlers by introducing an element of other 'dimensions'; perspective and time in those examples, parallel worlds with Cocoon. This is a puzzle game that deals in serotonin and joyous grins. The moment a solution clicked into place I found myself pausing the game to smile at the brilliance of the design.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this on many Game of the Year lists as it has been reviewing brilliantly and word of mouth will push the game into more hands. The fact that this game is free for Game Pass subscribers feels a bit criminal.
Featured Image Credit: MicrosoftTopics: Xbox, Xbox Game Pass