Geometric Interactive, 2023

A very pretty worlds-within-worlds puzzle game. This got rave reviews and won several awards, hence it sat on my list for a bit.

I have to admit to being a bit underwhelmed. It's beautifully executed, for what it is, but for most of the runtime the puzzles are quite straightforward. It's designed carefully to guide the player towards its solutions with relatively little friction, which has its own merit; but I was hoping for a crunchier challenge. Instead, the first two-thirds of the game mostly has the feeling of untying knotted shoelaces: You pull at whatever thread seems loose without much of a strategy, and before you know it things fall out.

In that sense it compared unfavorably to Patrick's Parabox, an earlier game that more fully explores the consequences of carrying worlds into other worlds, including recursion, mirrored realities and infinities. That game requires the player to think in unusual new ways, and while I think it teaches effectively it is not nearly as guided as Cocoon. If Parabox is a film studies class, Cocoon is the Indiana Jones ride. They serve different desires.

Cocoon does garnish its puzzles with a few gentle boss fights, brief and satisfying pattern-learning exercises that make satisfying chapter boundaries.