Modern games have a problem with trust. They never want you to feel stuck. They don’t mind throwing a hard boss at you, where their attack patterns must be studied to formulate a winning strategy, but that’s pretty much the only way games will challenge you these days. They never want you to stop at a puzzle, or have to figure out where to go next, for fear that youwon’tfigure, and will instead simply leave. I’m sure some boffins in a boardroom have done presentations on passive roadblocks and active roadblocks, but that’s the problem - too many games feel designed with pie charts in mind.Cocoonisa welcome break from that.
Getting stuck at a boss is what you might call an active roadblock, at least if you’re the kind of person who sees gamers as potential dollar signs and feels core demographic appeal is the most important aspect of art. It’s active because the player who is stuck is acting. You know you have to fight and kill the boss, you just can’t. When you fail, you get back up and try again. You get closer, you get angry and want revenge, you know you’re on the right track and simply overcome it thanks to sheer attrition. Games are still full of active roadblocks, but they’ve grown afraid of passive ones.
A passive roadblock is something you can’t fight. A puzzle that must be solved, a key that must be found, and so on. It’s harder to feel like you’re making progress in this instance. Puzzles can be figured out piece by piece, but the biggest stumbling block for most people is the very first. If you can’t even understand what a puzzle is asking of you, there’s nothing you can do. Likewise, once you’ve exhausted everywhere you can think to look for a key, there’s no next step if you can’t find one. Breaking down a door is done over and over again - that’s the boss battle. But opening a door is binary - it is open or closed. There’s no almost.
This is why gaming these days has abandoned, or at least severely simplified, its mental challenges. When games do use them, they often come witha sidekick who tells you the basic requirements of the puzzle, and the first few steps. It turns puzzles into elaborate fetch quests, with no thought required. I’m not sure if this has its roots in our collective lack of resilience and short attention spans as a media-consuming society, ordevelopers' growing reluctance to take risks. That feels a little chicken and egg.
This brings us to Cocoon. Indie games tend to be bigger risk takers than triple-A games, which is a little backwards when you think about it. Indie games need every player they can get, while triple-A games have flashy marketing and built-in IP power that ensures a relatively captive audience. Whatever the reason, Cocoon places a lot of trust in the player. There are no instructions, no UI, nothing. You instinctively push A when you come across a thing to interact with because years of gaming has told you that A = interact. It’s these instincts you must rely on entirely throughout the game.
Cocoon’s central mechanic is that you can pop in and out of various orbs to explore their worlds, and can take various other orbs with you, either to transport the orbs within orbs within orbs to new destinations, or to solve puzzles with orbs within other orbs. Each orb grants a unique characteristic, and switching them out requires thought and careful planning. No one tells you what to do, and if you get stuck, well, you’ll figure it out eventually.
The smartest move Cocoon makes is gating you in. As you travel across its worlds, parts of the map become closed off. It doesn’t feel like a linear journey in the sense that you’re in and out of different worlds and head in all sorts of directions, but once you clear an area, you can’t backtrack. This reduces a lot of stress when you get stuck - the game tells you (without ever actually telling you) that the solution cannot be more than ten steps away from you.
This approachlets you experiment with problem solvingwithout having to traipse through puzzles you’ve already done to grow frustrated. It never shows its hand, so you always feel that sense of accomplishment other games rob you of by telling you the answer, but it silently corrals you into knowing where to look.
I’ve been stumped a few times with Cocoon, and every time, just a little bit of lateral thinking has gone a long way. Gamers like to brag about difficulty modes, so there is an appetite for being challenged and pushed, and I hope more games (big and small) learn from Cocoon’s method of helpful silence.
