Indie Game of the Week 400: Cocoon

Developed by Geometric Interactive, a studio founded by Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid formerly of Playdead (they of Limbo and Inside fame), Cocoon has you jumping in and out of other universes to follow its breadcrumb trail without a lick of dialogue or text, leaving you occasionally stupefied but, owing to its linear nature, never lost for long. As another big number rolls around for the Indie Game of the Week, I consider how far I've come and how far left there is to go when, really, this isn't so much a midpoint or an endpoint but just a point in a long process that I intend to maintain until either I run out of Indie games to play or days left on this planet (oh hey, S.A.D., punctual as ever). Cocoon offers a similar feeling of being ever stuck between two infinite stretches, which is to say one giant Droste effect mindscrew that never makes the particulars of its Matryoshka-esque multiverse nor its protagonist's motivations all that clear—beyond just being some little moth guy juggling balls around—but its subtle signposting makes it at least evident enough where to go next and what immediate problem needs solving. Sometimes in life you don't need to know where the final destination will be, just the whereabouts of the next leg of the journey. (Sorry if I'm getting overly contemplative here; it's just that kind of game.)

As a little aside here with regards to these dialogue-free, mostly context-free adventure games, I had an epiphany recently about why many Indies go this route. I figured it was some sort of artistic license, to allow the player to attach whatever meaning they wished to the journey they'd just completed, but I suspect it also has something to do with the way many Indie devs of today were raised on emulated versions of older games. In those games, the plot details and "how to play" instructions weren't given a whole lot of emphasis within the game itself due to various memory constraints and it often fell to the manual and other documentation sold alongside the game to understand who you were and what you were meant to be doing in this world (and how). Since emulation by its nature leaves that documentation out, for many young retro gaming enthusiasts who dipped into the easily and freely accessible emulation scene in lieu of having the disposable income (or some other geographical-based limitation) to follow modern gaming, they'd frequently just wander through these archaic adventures absent any formal understanding of the plot and the setting, beyond what little the game provides in intro/outro text scrolls and whatever their own imaginations were able to conjure. (Might be a thing too that these games often only had English or Japanese options, and being a child living in a country where neither of those were the native language might present an obstacle also.) Entirely a theory, of course, but it might explain why the nostalgia-drenched Indie market is full of these "figure it out yourself" narratives.

Cocoon looks beautiful, in an ugly microbiological sort of way, with each of its world-within-a-worlds having a distinct background hue to match its equally distinct environment. The green ball, for instance, is a swampy planet like Dagobah that eventually takes on—while it's a ball, rather than while it's a planet—the ability to transform gaseous columns into solid ones which will displace you conveniently at the top if you're inside the clouds before they solidify. Each of the game's planets follow their own rules but also have a universal set of mechanics attached to them to alleviate some of the potential confusion: most notable are the portal generators that let you jump inside whichever orb is placed upon them, and the launchers which spit you back out to the layer above. Beyond that, the game's puzzles are all of the environmental nature, taking in your surroundings and figuring out what tools you have available. The game's also pretty subtle about closing off routes and other functions like buttons and switches once they're no longer a factor in the current progress-blocking conundrum: another way the game assuages its frequently bemused audience and keeps them on track. Honestly, the game had me at "here's a whole world you can just carry around with you like a beach ball": anything that reminds me of Democratus from Anachronox is a winner in my book (that's a planet that's also a party member, if you've forgotten).

Cocoon also has that quality that most puzzle games strive to earn, where it expects (or maybe hopes) the player will intuit a solution that has yet to cross their mind, surprising and delighting them at the sudden "oh wait, I can do that?" revelation. Games like Antichamber or Baba is You were careful to make sure certain rules were always in effect but the game made sure to set things up in such a way that the player only discovers these always-extant rules right around the time the game wants them to, and I'd say Cocoon has a pretty decent grasp on that trick too. There was a certain recursive mechanic I discovered late in the game that really had me scratching my head as to how it all worked and that's just one example of how the game continued to astonish its player at a knowingly deliberate pace. It is a fairly brief game, and beyond a few easily missed collectibles (the game's checkpointing system is top notch though, if you ever choose to go back for any you missed) you're probably going to see everything it has to show in due time and be inured to those same surprises again in any subsequent run. But hey, sometimes a game is only ever meant to be enjoyed once (unless you have a memory like mine, in which case you should be fine leaving a decade between playthroughs).

Cocoon is trippy, cool, consternating (in a mostly positive way), and absolutely worth playing through once (in perhaps a single session) to experience all it has to offer in full. I don't usually go out of my way to suggest games are "necessary" but Indies like these tend to highlight new zeniths of inventiveness that this medium is capable of reaching but so rarely does, given ingenuity doesn't always sell as well as a Fortnite cosmetic of Shaq wearing a Santa suit doing the Griddy or a NFT Rayman symbolically putting Ubisoft out of its misery with an Assassin Creed hidden blade. Whatever, I'm not here to rage against the crass commercialism of the game industry—especially not during this holy month of crass commercialism, as that just seems rude—but for as long as that juggernaut is able to shakily trundle along while rolling all over the player experience and the many talents it ruthlessly screws over with the dozens of studio closures this year alone I want to keep discovering and spreading the good word of faith-reaffirming games like Cocoon in this feature, for however long it (or I) may last. Here's hoping the next hundred IGotW entries are every bit as equipped to expand my horizons on what is possible for video games (though more likely than not they'll just be a whole bunch of mostly identical explormers—happy exploridays to those that celebrate!).

Rating: 5 out of 5.