Worlds within worlds within worlds. The concept of Cocoon is dizzying. See that orb? Walk over to it and you can press a button to dive inside, falling vertiginously into an entire world contained within a tiny sphere. Explore that world and you might find another orb with another world to dive into. Then you realise you can pick up the orbs and take them with you on your world diving.
Cocoon is the work of Geometric Interactive, a studio founded by former Playdead developers Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid not long after the release of Playdead’s Bafta-winning Inside in 2016. Schmid says that Carlsen came up with the idea of nested worlds right at the beginning, and “everything in the game has been built around that concept”. Now, some years later, the game is finally nearing release: and the hardest part has been finding a way to guide players through it all without melting their minds.
“You have to build this hierarchy in your head, and it makes for a different model of the world than we’re used to, same as a game like Portal,” says Schmid. It starts off simply: here’s a world to dive into. A few relatively gentle puzzles see you move platforms and open gates, sometimes necessitating that you dive out of the world and back into it again. Eventually you find and defeat a boss, which activates that particular orb’s special power: invisible paths now manifest when you carry it around.
The intensity ramps up gradually, says Schmid, with new orbs, new mechanics and new abilities being introduced. “At the end of the game is a fascinating play with these concepts,” he says, “but we introduce it so carefully that I think players will be surprised at what they were able to understand, because we teach them throughout.” The puzzles along the way might prove to be a test of the grey matter, as the solution could involve hopping in and out of several worlds, while carrying orbs between them. “You will always have this feeling of ‘It’s right within reach’, but you have to slightly twist your mind to get there,” says Schmid.
What’s particularly impressive is that this spiralling complexity is all controlled with a single button, which governs every interaction in the game. “We had experimented with other approaches,” says Schmid, “[but] because everything feels a little alien in the game … the controls have to be simple, you have to not be confused about what the buttons do.”
Speaking of aliens, the denizens of Cocoon have an otherworldly, insect-like appearance, which artist Erwin Kho arrived at by dressing up the protagonist. Originally it was a “boring” astronaut, he says: “I gave it a cape, just to make it a little bit interesting.” Then he split the cape in two, and “suddenly it looked a little bit like an insect from a distance”. From that simple change, the whole insectoid look of the game arose, and a backstory emerged from that. Although in keeping with the tradition of Schmid and Carlsen’s previous studio, the story is kept deliberately opaque. “We don’t want to give it to the players, we want them to discover for themselves,” says Schmid. “All of these things are hinted at, but only visually: we don’t have any text.”
Schmid is in charge of the game’s sound design, and early on he found inspiration from an anime. “I was watching Dragon Ball at the time, the original one, and I was fascinated with how all the sound effects were clearly made on synthesisers,” he says. He quickly decided that all the sound effects in the game should be created with synths to add to the alien feel. Meanwhile, the ambient music is generated in real time. “That has the benefit that [the tunes] will never loop because [they’re] randomised, and I can change things like pitch and filters based on what you’re doing,” he says. “I think many players won’t notice, and I’m totally fine with that: I just think it’s fascinating.”
The developers never envisaged it would take so long to get to this point. Kho moved to Copenhagen from the Netherlands to join the studio for what he thought would be a year-long contract. “And that was six years ago,” he laughs. “The project got a little bit out of hand, I have no regrets.” Schmid agrees that it was never meant to take so long: “We ended up having a much bigger game on our hands than we had thought from the beginning,” he says.
“We wanted to make games quicker than Playdead, that was our goal,” he continues, but making something iterative, experimental and polished simply takes a long time, just as it did for Playdead with Limbo and Inside. “We ended up taking just as long,” Schmid says. “Although at least we are coming out before their next game!”
Cocoon will be out 29 September on Xbox, PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch and PC
