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The much-anticipated video game designed by Jeppe Carlsen, the brain behind the puzzles in Limbo and Inside, seeks to deliver pleasurable moments of discovery.
By <\/span>Jason M. Bailey<\/a><\/span>
Long before the emergence of a winged protagonist who transports powerful orbs across the mysterious landscape of Cocoon, the adventure video game was an abstract computer science exercise gestating in its creator\u2019s head.
Early brainstorming focused on how the spatial relationships between interconnected realms could be used in puzzles, said Jeppe Carlsen, a lead designer of Cocoon. Each orb in Cocoon gives its carrier a unique ability \u2014 and contains another realm altogether. By jumping into one orb while carrying another, the pathways for possible solutions multiply.
\u201cThe whole concept is a little bit mazelike, being sort of trapped inside a structure of worlds within worlds,\u201d Carlsen said.
Carlsen began seriously pondering Cocoon\u2019s internal logic in 2016 after leaving Playdead, the Danish studio behind Limbo<\/a> and Inside<\/a>, games in which a quiet boy pushes, pulls, jumps, swings, climbs and swims his way to the solutions of environmental puzzles.
Those games sold millions of copies<\/a>, and fans of the genre \u2014 which rewards contemplation rather than the fast-twitch ability to shoot enemies \u2014 have been waiting to see what Carlsen, the brain behind Playdead\u2019s puzzles, could pull off with his first game at a new studio, Geometric Interactive.
Like Limbo and Inside, the story in Cocoon, which releases for all major consoles and the computer on Friday, is told without dialogue; the lone action button lets you set orbs on door-opening sensors or gently pull a creature into a more helpful location.
Playdead\u2019s games, however, were grim black-and-white meditations on death and free will that used bear traps and guard dogs to instill terror. Cocoon has more pleasurable moments of discovery, with its roots in raw logic.
\u201cIt\u2019s not born from a specific mood or wanting to tell a specific story,\u201d said Carlsen, who founded Geometric with Jakob Schmid. \u201cIt is spawned from something entirely different.\u201d
Independent designers can often take greater conceptual risks than large studios because they do not need to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars<\/a> spent creating hyper-realistic graphics and lengthy narratives.
Instead, the revelatory moments in Cocoon are fueled by recursion, a principle common in computer programing in which one solution is inherently connected to another; calculating the next number in the Fibonacci sequence<\/a> requires adding its previous two integers. (On a more pop cultural note, the director Christopher Nolan used layers of dreams to explore the concept in \u201cInception.\u201d<\/a>)
Because the dizzying connection between the worlds in Cocoon \u2014 which takes about five to seven hours to complete \u2014 was conceived early on, Geometric had flexibility in how to visually represent them.
When Schmid first heard Carlsen\u2019s pitch, he imagined a space setting with walls between different planets. The game\u2019s original prototype was a side-scroller, where the action unfolds from left to right like in the original Super Mario Bros., but they quickly discovered that it flattened the sensation of diving into a new world.
The immersive final product melds the mechanical and the organic, featuring insectoid bosses and stubborn plant life in a desolate environment. The sound design developed by Schmid is entirely synthetic. Crafting a frog\u2019s croaks was an early milestone, he said, and other challenges included the crunch of dirt and the patter of rain.
It was liberating to design puzzles in a top-down environment, Carlsen said. The first orb that Carlsen conceived is the first that players encounter; when carrying it, an orange penumbra reveals hidden walkways. At one point, traveling back and forth between worlds allows you to evade an incoming threat.
Not all of his ideas made the final product. A rhythm orb that explored the relationship with the game\u2019s music, for example, created interesting puzzles but also a constant drumbeat. \u201cI didn\u2019t find a way to not make it distracting,\u201d Carlsen said.
At times, people may be tempted to brute-force their way through Cocoon\u2019s tougher scenarios. In games like Patrick\u2019s Parabox<\/a> and Baba Is You<\/a> that lean into mathematical and computer science principles, there is a fine line between dazzling and baffling players.
Patrick\u2019s Parabox introduces infinite loops as an anthropomorphic box pushes others around \u2014 and inside one another \u2014 but its designer, Patrick Traynor, said he intentionally avoided certain brain-melting puzzles.
\u201cThere are also many variations where multiple infinity loops can happen simultaneously, and that can get really hard to model in your head as a player, and even for the game to visualize,\u201d Traynor said.
In Baba Is You, players manipulate rule-imprinted tiles (for example, [Flag] [Is] [Win]) to solve puzzles. But play testers convinced its designer, Arvi Teikari, not to make a level based on one enigmatic concept: For complex reasons, the character Baba can technically pass through walls while on a conveyor belt.
\u201cIt\u2019s in no way logical or intuitive to anyone playing the game,\u201d Teikari said, \u201cwithout full understanding of how it\u2019s implemented.\u201d
For Carlsen, that type of magician\u2019s trick \u2014 in which players can accomplish tasks without fully grasping the underlying implications \u2014 lets him introduce a paradox late in Cocoon that will make players question everything that has come before.
\u201cThere is the feeling,\u201d Carlsen said, \u201cof, oh, this should not be possible.\u201d
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