Reviews:
-
Mixing together impeccable artistic design and aesthetics with ever-changing puzzle objectives, Cocoon is quite endearing
Games whose strengths start with an interesting art style are typically a bit of a crapshoot. For some it feels like that’s their only redeeming quality but for others there’s thankfully some intriguing gameplay to go with it. Thankfully the latter is the case for Cocoon, a puzzle adventure of sorts that relies heavily on you as the player being curious and willing to experiment to understand its mechanics and how to proceed on to the next challenge. You will learn quickly that aside from some minimal audio cues and simply seeing how elements react to your actions visually you’ll be getting minimal guidance, and thankfully given that the areas tend to be relatively small this doesn’t tend to backfire too much. You may be challenged at times to randomly poke around a bit before you’ll understand what needs to be done, but I wouldn’t say that at any time I tended to feel stuck too terribly long. Marrying gorgeous visuals with engaging puzzles can absolutely make for a solid experience, but I will say that the lack of anything resembling a story to help pull it all together is a disappointment. It isn’t that the game needs it, but the fact is that when comparing Cocoon to its closest competition the lack of that element knocks it down a rung when others like Gris or The Gardens Between managed to pull off the trifecta. While it lasts this is absolutely worthwhile, but there’s definitely a feeling it could have been more.
Justin Nation, Score:Nindie Choice! [8.2]