Annapurna Interactive’s Cocoon is an isometric puzzle game featuring a quiet, barren world. The game features a bipedal, beetle-like protagonist who flies between techno-bug-strewn worlds. The catchy hook is that the world turns into a portable sphere, popping out of which is key to most actions.
The exhibited demo begins with a rocky landscape of dry adobe bricks and follows a fairly linear path. The start of the puzzle started with triggering a timed switch to create a bridge. There is also a type of puzzle that has a black beacon on the ground that glows when you cross it. The puzzle slowly evolves into a series of coordinated events. One was a series of pipes with switches along the path to rotate the curved section from one section to the next. Place the orb on top and press each switch in time to make sure the switch goes along the correct path, eventually reaching a trigger that creates a passage to the next path. Another was retaliation against a black beacon with various symbols that you have to touch in the correct order. The progression of the puzzles feels like a natural difficulty curve, and there are a few “aha!” moments. Moments on the way.
There was a boss fight at the end, which featured a giant wasp that was stuck on the island. They fired a series of golden spikes in rapid succession. Eventually, I was able to dig out a bomb bug crawling under the ground and detonate it in the face of a wasp. His second wave of bosses was a series of spinning spikes that he had to walk across without touching them. The pattern in which they move ebbs and flows as if they were breathing. Luckily, if you get hit and die, you’ll be spat out of the level and have to jump straight away, rather than seeing a Game Over screen.
Annapurna Interactive’s Cocoon is coming in 2023.