Cocoon

Cocoon is a minimalist logic adventure from the Danish studio Geometric Interactive, involving Jeppe Carlsen, a former game designer at Playdead, the studio behind Limbo and Inside, and the game builds on a simple yet profound concept of mutually nested worlds hidden inside portable orbs. The player controls a small insect-like creature that carries and switches between several such worlds, where entering an orb transports the player inside a smaller universe with its own puzzles, while changes made inside affect the world outside and vice versa, creating an elegant puzzle system of interconnected levels.

The game contains no text, dialogue, or tutorial; all understanding of the mechanics arises purely through observation and experimentation with the environment, an approach typical of the creators' previous projects. On PlayStation 5, the game excels with a clean graphic style featuring distinct color accents for each world against an otherwise dark, industrial backdrop, and gentle ambient music underscores the meditative pace without unnecessary haste. The gradual revelation of how the individual orb-worlds fit inside one another like a Russian matryoshka doll is among the most striking moments of the whole game and rewards the player with a feeling of pure understanding of the system.

Cocoon builds on the legacy of atmospheric, textless logic platformers made famous by titles like Limbo or Inside, but pushes it forward with its own original mechanism of nested worlds, which critics repeatedly called one of the smartest game ideas of the year. The game earned numerous nominations and awards in the best logic game category and was praised for its elegant design without a single unnecessary element. To this day, Cocoon is a showcase example of how a single game idea can be built into a compact, perfectly tuned experience from start to finish, without a single wasted minute.

Why play it: For fans of elegant, textless puzzle platformers, it's a compact, perfectly tuned experience built on the clever idea of nested worlds, without a single wasted minute.