It's exceedingly rare that I dislike a puzzle game, but I'm glad I'll never play this one again. As far as I'm concerned, Cocoon is a movie, not a game. Except it's a movie where you gotta press keys to keep the frames moving, so it's a tedious one. I wouldn't say it's a puzzle game because there are next to no puzzles to solve. It's more like Death Stranding: a walking sim with art direction on steroids and no meaning or depth whatsoever. It feels like the entire budget was spent on graphics and animations, and while it has a certain quality to it, from an interaction standpoint this game is boring.

If you look at puzzle games like Baba is You, The Turing Test, The Talos Principle, Portal, The Witness, etc., those games make you figure out a game mechanism and then make you creatively find one (or several) solution(s) to a puzzle by applying the mechanism. Instead, Cocoon makes it possible for you figure out what you have to do with lots of positive reinforcement loops (you're prevented from doing ANY OTHER THING like going back and you get a little music to tell you you're "finding" the right (the only) solution).

And then if you want to 100% and get the secret ending, good luck: this locking mechanism designed to prevent you from ever struggling to solve a puzzle locks you out of secrets if you decide to go one direction instead of another. So you end up squinting your eyes at every scene and going back and forth to see which pathway's likelier to lock you out, making the game inordinately longer to play.

I did not have fun.

It's exceedingly rare that I dislike a puzzle game, but I'm glad I'll never play this one again. As far as I'm concerned, Cocoon is a movie, not a game. Except it's a movie where you gotta press keys to keep the frames moving, so it's a tedious one. I wouldn't say it's a puzzle game because there are next to no puzzles to solve. It's more like Death Stranding: a walking sim with art direction on steroids and no meaning or depth whatsoever. It feels like the entire budget was spent on graphics and animations, and while it has a certain quality to it, from an interaction standpoint this game is boring. If you look at puzzle games like Baba is You, The Turing Test, The Talos Principle, Portal, The Witness, etc., those games make you figure out a game mechanism and then make you creatively find one (or several) solution(s) to a puzzle by applying the mechanism. Instead, Cocoon makes it possible for you figure out what you have to do with lots of positive reinforcement loops (you're prevented from doing ANY OTHER THING like going back and you get a little music to tell you you're "finding" the right (the only) solution). And then if you want to 100% and get the secret ending, good luck: this locking mechanism designed to prevent you from ever struggling to solve a puzzle locks you out of secrets if you decide to go one direction instead of another. So you end up squinting your eyes at every scene and going back and forth to see which pathway's likelier to lock you out, making the game inordinately longer to play. I did not have fun.