Contemplating they Orbs – Cocoon Review

Developer: Geometric Interactive | Platform: PS5 |

Playtime: 5:50 | Platinum: 6:00

It’s been a long wait for PlayDead’s third title following on from Limbo and Inside, which may be in part due to exodus from the company. Co-Founder N went on to create the middling reviewed Somerville, while chief gameplay designer N also moved onto a new studio thankfully offering a better game in the form of Cocoon. For whatever reason, when it was announced I just kind of decided I didn’t care about it. Not long after release I decided I was interested in the game again, so I went and played it – well worth my time and money.

Cocoon follows the same kind of narrative and structural beats as the games that came before – Silent protagonist in a strange world where the only things that exist are hostile. Here we are a little bug guy, awoken from a Cocoon (Hey!) and are seemingly tasked with destroying robots who have stolen Orbs (I guess they’re Cocoons but really they’re orbs) from around the world. The story isn’t really important beyond the inciting incident the game runs on, but both Limbo and Inside have dramatic endings that are open to interpretation whereas Cocoon’s falls a little flat. There is a secret ending unlocked after finding the games collectible, but I didn’t find them all before the end (I used chapter select to find the couple I had missed) so I didn’t get to see it. This shouldn’t be a problem for most people – none of the collectibles are difficult to find, though clearly some need more concentration than others.

While Limbo and Inside were kind of adventure platformers with physics based puzzles, Cocoon is straight up a puzzle game, no platforming of any kind. The games traversal, interaction and puzzle solving revolves around the four Orbs you collect on your travels. These orbs are an ingenious feature due to their multifaceted nature and how they are used in the design. In the levels, each orb has a different purpose – activating platforms, shooting, teleporting or what have you. That’s fairly standard fare. What makes them special is when the Orb is put on a special pedestal, they act as portals to new worlds. The Orb is both a power-up and a portal to a new world, which offers immense gameplay opportunity.

I think the most impressive aspect of the Orbs containing worlds is that they operate in real time, with things happening in the Orbs also occurring in the “Overworld” which allows puzzles to be extra creative. Admittedly some of the Puzzles got too smart for me, when you had to think about a solutions to puzzles that are two or three layers deep. It’s a testament to the strength of the game design, and I wouldn’t change it – just highlighting how advanced it can go. The challenge does escalate naturally, you are given ample time with each orb to understand how they work and what their unique interactions are before the next Orb is introduced. Due to the nature of jumping in and out of the various worlds, I feel like you can never truly have a proper feel for the layout of each world which makes puzzles that rely on navigation throughout several consecutively.

Something that I wasn’t terribly bothered by but I’ve seen as a complaint online is the tedium of once a puzzle is done, having to get the Orbs from Point A to Point B to then attempt the next puzzle. You can stack the orbs within each other for transport but that only alleviates the problem slightly. Your tolerance for tedium regarding this means your mileage may vary.

It’s hard to objectively review puzzle games 9You can’t objectively review anything really but that’s a separate discussion), as my praise or criticism depends entirely on my own intelligence which I feel is harder to quantify than mechanical skill. I consider myself decently smart, only having to look up two solutions in my playtime. To the games credit, my reaction wasn’t “How was I supposed to know that?!” but rather “Oh right yeah that makes sense”.

Despite my previous comparisons, I think Cocoon works as a bed fellow to PlayDead’s work rather than something that is attempting to emulate it. They strike different chords and do different things well. As a puzzle game, it’ll get your gears turning and have you really pondering your orbs.