Cocoon is a stellar puzzle game for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. Its game designer spoke to Polygon about what levels were hardest to design.
Cocoon is the puzzle aficionado’s delight. The isometric adventure from Geometric Interactive marries pared-down gameplay with a mind-bending premise where players jump between worlds nestled inside of orbs. Polygon spoke to designer and director Jeppe Carlsen about the making of this world’s curious puzzles. In that conversation, he revealed that for Cocoon, making the hard-to-beat puzzles came easily. Making the easy ones, on the other hand? That was the challenge.
In Cocoon, you control a tiny bug who navigates a dark twisting sci-fi world that blends insectoid organic matter with industrial worlds. The game pretty much presents the player with puzzle after puzzle after puzzle. Carlsen told Polygon that while players might expect complicated, multi-step puzzles to be the biggest challenge for designers, the opposite is often the case.
“Sometimes the puzzles that when you play, feel very elaborate and complex and like, ‘Whoa, how could someone even like design this?’ They’re not necessarily the ones that took a lot of iteration time,” he said to Polygon in a recent video call.
