Cocoon is the 25th selection of the UUGPGC. Finish by December 4. Spoilers open!

EDIT: Spoilers are now open!

PRIOR MESSAGE: Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club. Our 25th game of 2023 is Cocoon. The target completion date is December 4, 2023.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after December 4, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You are also free to come back any time after the completion date and share your thoughts! This club is meant to be open to all whenever you want to join in the fun!

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Cocoon?

An isometric puzzle exploration game from talent behind Limbo and Inside, in a trippy insect-influenced sci-fi setting.

How long is Cocoon?

How long to beat lists it as 4.5 hours long.

Been waiting to use that image, I bet!

I cracked this open yesterday, so I didn’t feel right about putting in any last-minute votes for it, but I’m glad it was selected. I had forgotten the connection to the classic Playdead games, so my first thought of “wow this feels like Inside in a lot of ways” feels obvious in hindsight. The gameplay of this one has a good, snappy feeling, something that all the other Playdeadlikes (not using “Limboners”, sorry Dan) have lacked. It’s also short and sweet; I’m 2 hours in or so, and my completion percentage is listed as 60%.

One really neat thing with the load game mechanic is that you can rewind it to any previous completion percentage. I don’t think I’ve seen a game do that before, but I’d like to see more do that in the future.

@allthedinos: Actually the image was a last minute decision. I went as far as booting the game up and playing the first 20 minutes or so to get some screenshots before deciding that Wilford Brimley deserved the place.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't feel right about voting for a game just because you've started it. I've definitely tie-broken in favor of games I've started or even finished. The whole point is to talk about games so voting for something you're already playing or have already played just guarantees that you'll have something to say and should be encouraged!

From the beginning of the game it's pretty cool. I don't really get an Inside vibe because it's not so much about trial and error and obviously the aesthetics are totally different, but it does have some similarities in art style and in the intelligence of the puzzle design. I'm also really digging the trippy visuals and unexpected ways that you interact with the environment.

The rewind feature sounds fantastic (especially for collecting stuff) and in general I am in favor of such systems. I think every game where it is feasible should have chapter select and the ability to view any cinemas you've seen. You can rewind to any scene in a movie or TV show, or flip to any page of a book, so why not a game?

Having finished this game...I liked it but I don't really get the hype. The alien world is very cool, the puzzles are interesting without (mostly) being frustrating, and it's pretty well paced. It's a very well made game, but I did not connect to it in the same way I did Inside or Limbo. Inside and Limbo both fed on the emotional impact of seeing a young boy mauled and killed in numerous ways, and the dreamlike horror of the visuals. Cocoon has a little bug man I did not at all care about, and the visuals were very impressive and fun but I had no emotional connection to them.

Is it cool that you go in and out of these spheres and stack them inside one another to carry them around? Very. It's a great conceit. On the other hand it can sometimes be annoying have to manage the fiddly placement of a bunch of stuff inside a bunch of different spheres (the white sphere interactions were particularly onerous to set up) and there were some dud puzzles like the ones where you had to find a pattern in the environment and hit the five symbols in that order.

I will give them that the boss fights were fun even though they had no stakes because you didn't really die.

People compared this game to Limbo, Journey, and Ico, and...it just was not at that level for me. I liked it quite a bit but in a "oh that was a fun little puzzle game with some original puzzles and nice visuals" way. I don't even remember the music except there was some.

This was a good choice for the club and, again, enjoyable game, I have only minor and specific complaints, but I'm not sure I will remember much about it other than the sphere transitions in a year or two. Even something like Gorogoa, which I did not like as much, is probably more memorable for me.

Probably The Pedestrian too. And I feel like this game got a LOT more hype.

Possibly because it's been kind of a weak year for these kinds of puzzle indie games and especially these kinds of games on Game Pass.

@bigsocrates: I think I like the game more than you but broadly agree that it ends up having a dulled impact compared to similar games. Its appeal for me probably centered around being able to solve the puzzles without thinking about them so much as feeling them out. My one year old tends to shout thoughts out of my brain, so that came in handy a number of times.

(Spoilers to follow)

This will probably end up in my top ten by default. As you said, it’s felt like a weak year for indies, which makes me think I’ve just chosen which ones to play poorly. To Cocoon’s credit, I wanted to keep playing and did finish the game, whereas I dipped into Jusant and probably won’t complete it. The ending of this game is very forgettable, which stands in sharp contrast to Inside and others. Even The Pedestrian (a game that frustrated me more than delighted me) had a really memorable final act. Unless grabbing all the secret blob guys changes things dramatically, this one just sort of… stopped, with a vague “create a universe” cutscene that didn’t hit for me. It felt anticlimactic even for a game that didn’t have much to invest in beyond a cool bug guy and their orbs.

Lest this all sound too critical, goddamn was the gameplay smooth. I wish other games handled half as well as Cocoon. It really hit its peak when I would dip into a world, rearrange something, exit that world into another, and exit THAT world to go back into the first one. Sometimes a brain just gives you the good zaps while you play it and that’s enough.

@allthedinos: I'd like to see your one year old try that strategy with me. I have no thoughts in my head to begin with. It's called strategery!

I also think this will be a top 10 game for me, though it's out of the like 20 I've played. It may be the second best indie I played this year after Sea of Stars. But compared to last year it would be behind games like Neon White, Citizen Sleeper, Norco, Weird West, Rollerdrome, Vampire Saviors and maybe even Tinykin. I just don't think there are a lot of indies that can measure up to that kind of lineup this year.

I'm also not sure how the ending COULD have had impact because I didn't care about what was happening (which I also didn't really understand.) Part of what makes Inside a masterpiece is that the world building, vague as it is, and your attachment to your character make the last act shocking and exciting. That just didn't happen here. And compared to The Pedestrian, I guess they could have done something equally clever and upending but they did not.

Yes the gameplay was smooth and the nesting spheres and various iterations on that were all clever. It's an excellent puzzle game and has maybe among the best and most varied puzzle design of any game I can think of. So it deserves a lot of credit there. But there were also parts where I didn't know where to go or what to do, which were frustrating (though the game thankfully stops you from backtracking when it's not useful much of the time) and I had no connection to the game beyond enjoying the gameplay and thinking the visuals were cool. That's enough to make it a very good game, but not a great one.

@bigsocrates: You reminded me of something I was extremely grateful for in the game design. The game does a really good job of closing off possibilities that won’t solve your current puzzle. I can’t recall specific instances right now, but one example is making you use an orb that won’t help you to manage some other aspect of the puzzle, so no item is superfluous. I see a lot of puzzle games obfuscate their solutions unnecessarily by giving you too many options, and Cocoon sets the table with the minimum that you need. I wish a lot more puzzle games did this, it’s simplified without feeling hand-holdy.

@allthedinos It does this in a number of ways (including closing off paths behind you, making spheres unusable if they are properly placed, and deactivating no longer useful things.

I also liked this aspect though occasionally it made it too obvious what to do and also sometimes a path that was useless would be left open and I would get tricked because you can usually only backtrack if that's part of the right solution. Some people enjoy the frustration and release of having a ton of options and having to figure it all out but I'm with you. It's not fun to spin your wheels or waste your time. Especially in games where the puzzle answers sometimes require figuring out what the designer is thinking (to be fair Cocoon doesn't have this problem much, it's pretty fair) getting channeled towards at least the right kind of thing to think about is usually a positive.

This is my favorite part of the game's design. That it did this and the puzzles still felt puzzly enough to be just enough of a challenge to be satisfying to solve, is amazing.

I got enthralled by the game from the moment I started it. Love the minimalistic yet detailed visual design, and the audio was entrancing. There really wasn't a thing I didn't like about it and it's easily one of my favorite puzzles games as a whole package. It takes a mechanic and teaches you how it works in the most intuitive way, every single time it introduces a new one. And it builds upon the mechanics in the same way. Moment to moment, just a constant state of satisfaction. The different combinations of those mechanics throughout the game adding in complexity was just brilliant. It felt like a build up to a crescendo that delivered everything that the earlier experiences showed potential of.

5/5 and 10/10 for my personal rating.

Cocoon falls in the (perhaps lesser) category of more "exploratory" puzzle game than actual puzzle-solving puzzle game. I never got stuck or not know where to go, which is a testament to its design and polish, but most of the times I didn't know what the goal of the puzzles were - I'd say about half the puzzles were solved "accidentally" because the solution was the only affordance available at the time and I had no set objective in mind (i.e. I just followed very linear path/set of actions because it closed off all other options).

But don't get me wrong, I still had a good time and I think it's really well made.

So, I really enjoyed the creepy unsettling vibe of the world, and from the beginning I enjoyed the orb gameplay well enough. I started to get kinda bored with it halfway through, until you get white and the puzzles get more intricate. THEN it started to really wow me, with shooting through the orbs, and especially when the orange and white orbs connected- I really thought that was neat. But frankly, that last hour or two was the only part that left any lasting impression. Enjoyed it, sort of glad it was short.