The new puzzle game from the lead gameplay designer for Limbo and Inside is entitled Cocoon. The game begins by placing the beetle-like protagonist in a beautiful but lonely world. There is no preamble, no text overlays and not even a single hint of what you’re supposed to do at the start of the game. As you move your character around for a while, you discover a staircase and a glowing pad that changes color when you press a button that turns a rock into another staircase thereby granting you progress through the world. As you solve rudimentary puzzles at the onset of the game, you discover orbs that you carry on your beetle-like back which serve as keys or items to solving puzzles and thereby creating progress through the game. Each orb that you come into contact with functions as a new world with new and challenging puzzles to overcome.

Cocoon is the first game from Geometric Interactive, a studio founded in 2016 by Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid. Both of them were responsible for the studio behind Limbo and Inside and Carlsen was the lead gameplay designer for those games. These games are similar in the way that they both are side-scrolling puzzle platformers that use the environment in order to create challenging puzzle simulations to tell a story and guide players throughout the world. The story is much the same in all three of the games but Cocoon’s structure of layered, interconnected worlds is a whole new feat accomplished by the designers. Cocoon is also different in its expression of artistry and maturity.

The game also includes boss fights which are deemed as ‘Guardians.’ In these boss fights, there is no ‘true’ combat but there is a degree of combat in the way the Guardians behave to steal away the orb from your character. There is a large degree of timing and skill in solving the optimal way to defeat a Guardian as they attempt throw your orb away from your body which merely returns you to the starting screen where the boss awaits. More clearly, there are no fail states in the world of Cocoon. If a Guardian does manage to throw your orb away from your body, you do not ‘die’ in any traditional sense you just return to the entrance screen of the boss fight and try again.

Critics rave Cocoon is a triumph in the world of puzzle games as it provides a vast array of environments and tricky puzzles to keep players interested.