Cocoon designer explains why the best puzzles aren’t always difficult

Cocoon It is truly a marvellous puzzle game. It’s chock-full of puzzles that encourage “aha” moments due to their elegant presentation and intuitive design; the sheer simplicity of some of the solutions will leave you slack-jawed. This game is deceptively straightforward: You are in control of a bug, who can use an orb to gain powers. At the same time, it also acts as a miniature world that you can explore. As the bug discovers more orbs, more powers, and more worlds, the game becomes more of a mind-bending experience, and as it turns out, it’s one that game designer and director Jeppe Carlsen told Polygon he only achieved by letting go of the notion that puzzles always need to be hard to be good.

CocoonIt is the debut title from Geometric Interactive. The studio was founded by Geometric Interactive. CocoonCarlsen began his career as a game designer for Playdead, working on games such Limbo You can also find out more about the following: The Insider. This isometric game has a lot of puzzles. You will be solving them one by one, and there may even be a boss fight thrown in.

Much of the game’s brilliance comes from its simplicity. In addition to directional inputs, the game only has one other “action” button that players use to pick up and place orbs, or to teleport into each orb. Because each orb has its own power and contains its own world to explore, players progress through the game by jumping between those orbs and using each orb’s unique power to solve the mysteries inside its world. Create your own unique world by crafting the orbs. Cocoon, Jeppe had to challenge his preconceived notions about what does and doesn’t make for a “good” puzzle.

“I think generally, with the puzzle design, Cocoon versus some of the work I’ve done in my past, I’m less focused on it being difficult,” Jeppe told Polygon in a recent video call. “When I started my career, that was basically the only thing I cared about, right? It had to be original, and also difficult. Like, people should not just solve this; that’s a bad puzzle, right? What? Cocoon, I’ve sort of grown out of that a little bit.”

The team explored the potential of these puzzles by rethinking their value beyond the difficulty. Puzzles are a great way to communicate about a world or story. Players can be surprised or delighted by them. The developers were able to create more challenging puzzles by evaluating them on a wider scale than just their difficulty. Cocoon The game is now fully realized.

“I’m evaluating my puzzles on many more parameters than just, is it difficult? So it’s more like, is this prepping the player for something important for me? Do I want the player to do or think a certain way? That’s a value,” Jeppe said. “It can have an interaction that feels nice — like, slam dunk. That’s a value, just a pure interactive value that adds to the puzzle, aside from it possibly being difficult. But I think I’ve gotten better at that. To think about the puzzle more broadly than just, ‘Is it challenging?’ Which is one parameter, but there are many parameters that are interesting. I’m more interested in: ‘Is it stimulating?’”

The game’s difficulty was fluidized by focusing on puzzles that have a functional purpose and their variety. Jeppe used simpler puzzles in this manner to explain concepts and the rules of the game without being overly directive. Jeppe would angle the player’s approach in a specific way, setting them up to understand or learn something new.

“The whole point of the game is that I’m designing these rooms and trying to make them as accessible for you to figure out [and] get a little epiphany yourself, for that feeling that the game literally told you how this works,” said Jeppe. “I call them ‘thinking rooms.’ It’s like I’m trying to design a room that is as suitable as possible for you to think and get the idea that I want you to get.”

And it worked — Polygon’s review of Cocoon described the end result as “impossibly good.” Cocoon Now available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 PlayStation 5 Windows PC Xbox One Series X Xbox One