Cocoon is a visually engrossing and mentally stimulating puzzle game. The setting stood out to me first. It is acutely alien, with fantastical flora, critters that are both cute and creepy, and environments that feel different from the classic video game biomes. The whole package is sold by a plethora of bespoke and fluid animations, in addition to sound design that is more atmospheric rather than melodical. Each "world" is contained within an orb, and the player can move in and out of these orbs, while also manipulating them inside each other, which forms the core of the puzzle gameplay. The pacing of the game felt unique too, as there isn't much of a clear structure to when you find new orbs or fight bosses, adding to the wonder and mystery of the world. Although there's not a clear story or narrative, I did find myself attached to each of my orbs in a very organic and funny way, much like the companion cube in Portal.

As the player you can only move and do a few actions: grab or release an object (you can also long press the button to activate some elements). Everything happens with one button, and with an accessibility option in the menu, any combination of joysticks and face/trigger buttons on a controller can be used for the game. (Sidenote: I love playing lazily with one hand and having the option to switch my grip whenever a hand gets tired. So few games are playable like this.) There aren't many actions, but each orb (and each world within) has unique mechanics so there ends up being a decent variety in gameplay. There are also boss fights which have you dodging in various ways and damaging a weak spot using a key object unique to that fight.

A single word I would use to describe the gameplay is "smooth". The puzzles slowly escalate, and never focus on one mechanic too long before moving on to the next thing. Some of the more mind-bendy twists of the world-within-world concept are only used once and then never again. The game is very strict about keeping the player on-track, and fail states are impossible (natural gates automatically appear at various stages to lock the player into an area, preventing needless backtracking when stuck). Once realizing this, it's easy to deduce solutions as every element in the area was necessary and nothing superfluous was kept. Because of this, and the fact that the possible actions are always quite limited, I never found any puzzle difficult and there's always exactly one solution for each one. This rigid approach to puzzle design eliminates a lot of frustration that can be present in other puzzle games, but also reduces the creativity and "eureka" moments. There are plenty of clever puzzles here, but I attributed that cleverness mostly to the designers for creating them, rather than myself for finding the solutions. This could have been a game with zero frustration, except for one late-game boss fight which tested my patience by requiring several sequences of precise timing and aim.

I loved this game mostly because of its atmosphere, fluid controls, and concise playtime. The puzzles were clever, and despite never truly testing me, it was a pleasure simply discovering all the twists the designers devised. The fluidity of the movement and animations made the game fun to interact with as well. I highly recommend this one, and due to it's friendly level design, it could be great for novices of the genre as well.

This game gets a lot of credit for having lush, beautiful pixel art with many bespoke animations overlaid with modern lighting effects. It manages to invoke old JRPGs while also clearly being a huge technical leap forward. It does this with the character movement too; traversing the world isn't just walking in 4 or 8 directions, it also involves jumping over gaps, shimmying over ledges, climbing walls, and generally interacting with the world in much more fluid way. The soundtrack is also wonderful, catchy, and fits the world well.

Sea of Stars more than deserves all the praise it gets for these things, and I think that carries the experience for many people. For me though, it wasn't enough to finish the game after about 5 hours of play time. I found the rest of it pretty lackluster. The story and characters didn't grip me at all, the puzzles were never complex enough to be engaging, and the combat seemed really shallow and not very customizable. I like that it borrows the interactive turn-based approach from the Mario RPGs, but I found the animations were poorly choreographed and the timings too hard to hit. There is also very little customization for stats or items, leaving characters with a small and static pool of abilities.

Despite the beauty and polish of the overall package, I needed either the combat or story to be compelling enough for me to be motivated to finish the game. There's a chance I could return to it later, but there are other RPGs I'd rather play first.

Has all the indulgent poeticism of a Squaresoft game from this era - characters will take literally any opportunity they can get to stare into the neon mid-distance and pontificate about systems and societies and self, often with only the most tangential relation to cars and car-racing. The writing (vis-a-vis this wonderful fan translation) is meaningfully mature, but becomes almost comical when placed within the material confines and context of a street-racing JRPG where you drive a tiny Hot Wheels Toyota around a chibi overworld in order to race ambulances and milk trucks, much in the same way certain serious scenes from the original Final Fantasy VII strike an odd tone when delivered by chunky Lego figurines. To get yourself in the right headspace for this, imagine a racing-jacketed Sephiroth monologuing about the nature of the industrial universe with a steering wheel in his hands instead of a katana.

The novelty of this scenario sustains the game for at least six hours, but not only is the game written and painted by Squaresoft, it's also programmed by them too - and as you can probably imagine, the programmers behind the precise, methodical War of the Lions and Bahamut Lagoon (why all the lagoons?) aren't exactly a natural transplant to the tactile, meditative world of high-octane street racing. The cars handle too stiffly for too long, and this awkward gamefeel was compounded by me playing Forza Horizon 5 and OutRun 2 SP at the same time; when the main character talks about the rush of the road, it's hard not to mentally transplant yourself beyond this pixel-grained lagoon of digital-binary inputs and instead see yourself hitting a big smooth drift on a distant sun-soaked coast, your girlfriend in the passenger seat instead of being creepily longed for from a Yokohama high-rise window.

This problem is exacerbated by some truly chronic load times - random encounters will hit you with a quadruple whammy of different loading screens, including a few that are required just to facilitate a mandatory parts-swapping menu at the end of every race. Imagine if Final Fantasy VII had a few seconds of darkness and ten seconds of NOW LOADING... before and after every battle, and then you had to unpick and reconfigure your materia setup every time you slam-dunked a tonberry - that's the essential gameplay loop here, and it kinda sucks! Gearheads might enjoy the precise methodology behind taking your engine apart after every race, but I really just wanted to go fast and read more poetry about this speedy Squall's perception of wings, windscreen wipers and women. Nothing stings harder than spending a few minutes deciding on the right muzzle for your engine, only to have your material goods and personal time stolen away in the very next race by a boy racer with a ride that outclasses you on pure numbers alone. Why doesn't Sho Akasaki write a haiku about that pain?

Racing Lagoon's dichotomy between its espoused mood and practical nature is ultimately what lead to me shelving it - I can't in good conscience play a racing game that moves with the pace and finesse of a busted Ford Pinto with a wheel clamp, even if it does have some of the richest, most stylish textures of any game from its era. Sadly, Square's spectacular street style simply can't sustain such sluggish substance. There's no doubt a way to mod around all the standing around here, but I don't know what it is - this is perhaps another 90s JRPG that would benefit from the 1/2/3x speed slider that Square love putting in their rereleases, and a lazy mood-chaser like me would love all the automotive engineering stuff to be handled by some mindless "auto" option. Until video game developers and modders start catering to my very specific impatiences, you can count me out of this particular race.

A fine game with a lot of effort behind it with some bad design decisions mixed in.
I really love 2D Metal Gear, which is probably why this game fell a little short for me. While I love some parts of this game, others really drag down the experience in my opinion. It all works, it all functions quite fine, some parts just overstay their welcome a little. Personally I think this game could have done with some pruning. My first playthrough took around 9 hours and I think about 3 of those could have been cut out entirely.

I felt that the cutscenes in this game dragged on for way too long and the dialogue itself, while funny in places, was nothing to write home about. It's very much self aware, this is played for laughs multiple times but if I'm being honest it started to annoy me in the last 2 to 3 hours of the game and I could never really get invested in the story. Which seems like a problem to me, because there is just so much of it. There's obviously a gag about Metal Gear having long cutscenes in here, but personally I think it falls completley flat. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake for the MSX has a lot of dialogue but not nearly the amount this game has. MG2 is also around 5 hours shorter. But let's pretend the comparison is not invited and judge it on it's own merits.

The gameplay is a mixed bag for me aswell. Movement is very smooth and fun, the shooting works just fine and I really liked the inventory system. That being said I have mixed feelings about the stealth mechanics. Some sightlines seemed a little undercooked for me. Getting caught is usually either a game over or a healing item tax. There's no chase, no hide and seek. The level design rarely allows you too outwit the AI by finding a clever hiding spot or simply lose them in the corridors. There are items and weapons which can help you take out guards, however there are no items which help you to hide from them. Due to this every room becomes a simple game of "How was this room designed to be beaten?". During my first and sadly only playthrough I felt that the game offered very little in terms of player expression and creativity. Everytime I thought I outsmarted the game a text box appeared and told me: "Sorry, you can't do that yet." Lastly I thought that the leveling system felt completley tacked on.

I really wanted to love this game. But I'm afraid it's just gonna be that one playthrough for me. There isn't much reason to revisit it as far as I'm concerned.
Still if you are into 2D Metal Gear, I'd give it a look.