This review contains spoilers
At the risk of being more rude than it really deserves, Cocoon feels like an award bait indie game.
It's a puzzle game that wants to suggest its abstract alien environments are part of a fully formed universe. Yet it's blindingly obvious every object you interact with was placed there to craft a puzzle for the player and not to be a part of a coherent world. Why is this switch here? Why does this door function this way? It's not because you're going through a world that was lived in by people like in a Myst or Machinarium. It's because the player must have puzzles in their way. There's nothing more underwhelming to me than seeing a really cool alien shape that looks important and mysterious only to find out a few hours later that it's a glorified on/off switch for some arbitrary components of the world.
It's a game that is so terrified of you getting lost or confused, it will constantly put up barriers everywhere to keep you on the one correct path. It feels scared of being too complex. Every new mechanic it introduces rigidly interacts with the world in dedicated spots for that mechanic. You can use the green orb to move up and down specific incidental green elevators. You can use the orange orb to walk on incidental orange walkways. You can use the silver orb to shoot a bullet but only on dedicated shoot spot and only to flick a specific type of environment switch. I think at some point they forgot the purple orb existed because its gimmick is used in one short segment and then never again. Or maybe they hated making puzzles for it.
It's all so binary and inorganic. Puzzles only ever have as many moving parts as you need to solve them. You can deduce how to solve most by the fact that you will have to interact with all components. It lacks the organic interactive building blocks of a Baba is You or a Chip's Challenge to be challenging. It lacks the narrative cohesion between puzzle and environment to feel like you're walking through a coherent world in the way a Myst game would. The only couple times I ever got stopped by a puzzle was because it used a player interaction I did not know existed.
It's a game that suggests it will ramp up to some mind blowing revelation about the nature of itsworld and then it kinda doesn't really. Or well, I guess it does, but it's done in such a guided way that it doesn't feel like you figured it out on your own and you can barely play around with it. Then, having barely explored the puzzle potential of its central premise in the final hour, it just kinda stops. Roll credits.
It does looks cool and minimalist though, just like Journey or Monument Valley. That's all you need really.
It's. fine.
It's a puzzle game that wants to suggest its abstract alien environments are part of a fully formed universe. Yet it's blindingly obvious every object you interact with was placed there to craft a puzzle for the player and not to be a part of a coherent world. Why is this switch here? Why does this door function this way? It's not because you're going through a world that was lived in by people like in a Myst or Machinarium. It's because the player must have puzzles in their way. There's nothing more underwhelming to me than seeing a really cool alien shape that looks important and mysterious only to find out a few hours later that it's a glorified on/off switch for some arbitrary components of the world.
It's a game that is so terrified of you getting lost or confused, it will constantly put up barriers everywhere to keep you on the one correct path. It feels scared of being too complex. Every new mechanic it introduces rigidly interacts with the world in dedicated spots for that mechanic. You can use the green orb to move up and down specific incidental green elevators. You can use the orange orb to walk on incidental orange walkways. You can use the silver orb to shoot a bullet but only on dedicated shoot spot and only to flick a specific type of environment switch. I think at some point they forgot the purple orb existed because its gimmick is used in one short segment and then never again. Or maybe they hated making puzzles for it.
It's all so binary and inorganic. Puzzles only ever have as many moving parts as you need to solve them. You can deduce how to solve most by the fact that you will have to interact with all components. It lacks the organic interactive building blocks of a Baba is You or a Chip's Challenge to be challenging. It lacks the narrative cohesion between puzzle and environment to feel like you're walking through a coherent world in the way a Myst game would. The only couple times I ever got stopped by a puzzle was because it used a player interaction I did not know existed.
It's a game that suggests it will ramp up to some mind blowing revelation about the nature of itsworld and then it kinda doesn't really. Or well, I guess it does, but it's done in such a guided way that it doesn't feel like you figured it out on your own and you can barely play around with it. Then, having barely explored the puzzle potential of its central premise in the final hour, it just kinda stops. Roll credits.
It does looks cool and minimalist though, just like Journey or Monument Valley. That's all you need really.
It's. fine.