What is a great game made of?
Of course it’s our game of the year.
Cocoon is ingenious, elegant, and thought-provoking.
It’s precise, expressive, and generous.
It takes game design forward even as it seems to emerge from its deep history.
But more than anything, Cocoon is playful.
Its puzzles, its tricks, all yield to playfulness.
you could be inside something that is inside something else that is inside the thing you are carrying.
Cue much design brilliance.
We all agree that Cocoon is very clever - dazzlingly so.
It goes to impossible places and manages to lead you there too.
And yet you do notice it.
We all noticed it - and we just loved Cocoon all the more.
The other way is to poke a little bit, to try and see something else in the game.
This is what I’ve been trying to do this morning, prior to writing this.
And here’s what I’ve got.
Cocoon is a clever puzzle game in a year that is pretty rich in clever puzzle games.
I mean there are games that are interested in what games aremadeof.
As an example, I think you could look at something like Birth.
This is a game about loneliness in a big city, and it’s beautiful and moving.
But I love it because it’s a game about pebbles and feathers and bits of rodent bone.
It’s about scraps of stuff, dried stuff, crumpled up, sharp-edged stuff.
That’s what makes it what it is.
Elsewhere, look atSludge Life, andSludge Life 2, which we got this year.
All of this seen through the scratchy, strobing, warping videotaped fish-eye of an old camcorder or somesuch.
That’s what Sludge Life is made of.
And look at what Cocoon is made of!
You have puzzles and spatial-juggling ingenuity and a lot of challenges that are really about different kinds of doors.
But you also have this wonderful, frightening mish-mash of substances.
You have insect wings, fat tumours and adenoids and myelinated axons.
You have hand-sculpted metal, and sandy rock, and swamp flowers and very fine circuitry.
This, then, is the disciplined mind and the wild eye.
Weirdly, I suspect a lot of this comes down to technology.
you should probably be able to render things in 3D pretty well to give them a convincing material reality.
(What is Mario 64 made of?
I realise I have no idea!)
Looked at through this lens I’m delighted to tie two big pieces of discovered joy from 2023 together.
