Best Of 2023: Cocoon's Culmination Of Spheres Was One Of This Year's Most Enchanting Moments

Best Of 2023: Cocoon's Culmination Of Spheres Was One Of This Year's Most Enchanting Moments https://ift.tt/FjJlLgO

Cocoon can be a difficult game to describe without seeing it in action. The delightful puzzle adventure comes from one of the minds behind other puzzle classics, such as Limbo and Inside, which makes its high-level of ingenuity somewhat unsurprising. Despite that, it's a game that delicately layers its difficulty and naturally leads you to solutions, never being too explicit about guiding you while also providing just enough of a push in the right direction to make each solution feel earned and rewarding. The core conceit of Cocoon lies in its use of various orbs, each of which contains a unique world, that you can enter and exit at will. When inside, you're tasked with exploring a completely new area with its own set of themed puzzles. However, upon exiting a world, you can carry its respective orb you were just exploring on your back, and use its inherent ability to navigate the larger world outside. It's a simple gameplay loop to wrap your head around when you're juggling two distinct worlds, but becomes far more complex when that number gets gradually increased over time.

Each of Coccon's world's has its own theme, but also its own ability that you unlock after beat its respective boss. The first orange-tinged world, for example, features puzzles centered around invisible platforms that can only be traversed when observed with a particular power. Soon after beating the world's boss, this power transfers outside of the world it previously existed in, letting you now traverse previously invisible pathways while carrying this particular world around on your back. Later on, another world grants you the ability to alter the state of water-based columns around you, transforming them from opaque blocks into liquid, traversable ones that can propel you vertically to new areas.

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