Compared to other games, especially free games Cocoon is actually quite good but based on how it was marketed it has been a bit of a letdown for me.
The trailer that I saw on the PS Network presented it as an action sort of game with puzzles, which is something that I normally like. However, what really sold me on it was the fact that they talked so much about how the same designers that made Inside and Limbo, two games I absolutely love, were involved in the design process. To sweeten the pot anymore it was published by Annapurna Interactive, who is the publisher of some of my favorite games ever such as What Remains of Edith Finch, Outer Wilds, and Stray.
The game is a 3rd person perspective game with a top-down view and the gameplay starts out pretty simplistic, as you would expect.
You play the role of some sort of beetle creature who must navigate increasingly difficult puzzles in order to accomplish... something.
Just like with Limbo and Inside, your objective is never really explained to you and it is kind of up to you, the player, to determine what the heck is going on here.
I love games that are like this because I have grown tired of drawn out huge stories and JRPG's can kiss my butt. If I wanted to read a book or watch a film I would do that... I want to play a game.
In that regard Cocoon does exactly what you need it to do because other than occasionally telling you what the buttons do there is zero words on screen. Also just like Inside and Limbo the buttons are very sparsely used at all. So this can be considered a rather casual game... well that is until the puzzles become a bit maddeningly difficult.
Herein is the problem that I have with this game as opposed to other Geometric Interactive games. If you do a puzzle incorrectly in Cocoon, there is often a rather large amount of backtracking that you have to do, sometimes instances that take you between various "worlds." While playing Inside and Limbo the puzzles were all contained in one particular area and while I applaud them not just making another one of those, I think that this might well be a case of "if it isn't broken, don't fix it." I would have loved to have played another version of Inside again because that is one of the best games ever made by anyone.
This isn't to say that this is a bad game: I definitely do not think that is the case. I'm just saying that since it was marketed very heavily as being made by Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid, who were heavily involved in Inside and Limbo, I was kind of expecting a dark and oddly eerie world. I guess we kind of get that with Cocoon, but for me I think that this one just doesn't quite have the wow factor that the aforementioned and critically acclaimed games have.
There are also "boss fights" in Cocoon and while this is welcomed, it can be a bit frustrating figuring out what the hell you are actually meant to do.
Again, this is not BAD per se, it is just a departure from what I am accustomed to with these particular designers and perhaps it is just taking me a little while to get used to it.
one of the main things I enjoyed about Limbo and Inside was that if you failed at a puzzle area, you would immediately try again. In Cocoon, there is no fail-state so to speak. Instead, you endlessly traverse a particular segment of a "level" until you eventually figure it out or you get frustrated enough to look it up online.
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the puzzles rapidly become quite complex
Since this game is free for PS-Plus users, I'm not going to lambaste it too much because it IS a good game. I know that they used the names of the previous games to draw attention to this one and sell more copies, but it is specifically because of that marketing that I find this game a bit more tedious than i probably would otherwise.
To be fair to the devs though, this is a lot like that line by Eminem where he says "I'm not gonna be able to top where my name is."
It's free, so give it a go. I don't think I will complete it because traversing rather large segments trying to figure out a puzzle that I end up looking up the answer to online out of frustration eventually isn't exactly what I am looking for at the moment.
I should mention before I go, that the sound and music in this game is absolutely outstanding.