One of Cocoon’s easiest puzzles was the hardest to design
Cocoon is the puzzle aficionado’s delight. The isometric adventure from Geometric Interactive marries pared-down gameplay with a mind-bending premise where players jump between worlds nestled inside of orbs. Polygon spoke to designer and director Jeppe Carlsen about the making of this world’s curious puzzles. In that conversation, he revealed that for Cocoon, making the hard-to-beat puzzles came easily. Making the easy ones, on the other hand? That was the challenge.
In Cocoon, you control a tiny bug who navigates a dark twisting sci-fi world that blends insectoid organic matter with industrial worlds. The game pretty much presents the player with puzzle after puzzle after puzzle. Carlsen told Polygon that while players might expect complicated, multi-step puzzles to be the biggest challenge for designers, the opposite is often the case.
“Sometimes the puzzles that when you play, feel very elaborate and complex and like, ‘Whoa, how could someone even like design this?’ They’re not necessarily the ones that took a lot of iteration time,” he said to Polygon in a recent video call.
Early on in the game, when players arrive at the industrial world for the first time, there’s a simple puzzle. In it, the player encounters two rotating doors and two switches. In the final version of the game, all you need to do is use the orb on both switches to line up the doors so that there’s a gap you can walk through. The solution is so simple that Carlsen describes it as “barely” being a puzzle, saying that it’s more like an interaction. As it turns out, it was one of the most complicated puzzles to design in the entire game.
“That puzzle has [been] iterated so many times, and it is literally the simplest thing in the world. It’s
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