Cocoon
Jeppe Carlsen has designed two games which I thought were amazing: Limbo and Inside, and so I was keen to try Cocoon, his latest effort.
The game is a non-stop series of puzzles. You control a little bug-like thing, travelling through a 3D alien world with pleasant rounded shapes and pastel colours. To progress, you have to carry orbs and use them to activate switches. At first, this simply triggers equipment like elevators and bridges so that you can move through the levels, but later on, you can actually go into the orbs, and each of them contains a whole other world. Discovering how the puzzles interact across nested orbs is really satisfying.
I had a lot of fun with Cocoon, but I have to say that it doesn’t quite live up to Limbo and Inside. The two older games have such unique and immersive visual designs, both creepy and horrifying in their own ways, whereas Cocoon’s aesthetics feel kind of generic. It’s a small criticism against an otherwise great experience.