To the Opera House!
“Getting stuck,” he said, or something along those lines.
“We used to call that gameplay.”
I can attest to this in a very personal way.
(I don’t think that’s one of Schafer’s.)
This came back to me this week because I’ve been playing Cocoon.Cocoon is brilliant.
It’s one of the best things I have encountered in an absolute age.
How did I end up doing this stuff?
The way Cocoon does this, I think, is it focuses you.
It follows you through the game and whenever there’s a puzzle it quietly locks down your options.
By this I mean that the perimeter of the puzzle, as it were, is very clear.
This immediacy, this careful curation of puzzle pieces, makes Cocoon brilliant to play.
It’s challenging, it’s just not frustrating, and it never seems arduous.
I’d like to make this clear up-front: I love this approach to design.
It also made me think: how do I feel about games that don’t do this?
It was inOddworld: Stranger’s Wrath.
What’s past is prologue.
You’re facing in the right direction, and the rest of the adventure is ahead of you.
This is a simple version of the trick that Cocoon regularly plays.
And at the time I remember exactly what I thought about it.
I thought: I wonder if the oldTomb Raider gamesever did this?
Did I need to force it open?
I don’t know.
And this week I started to think: were they all these things for the same reasons?
So I still think what Cocoon does is brilliant and democratic and completely ingenious.
But I also remember that there were upsides to games where you got stuck a bit more often.
The deserted De Chirico version of Venice.
Not gameplay, then, but something else - and something I will never forget.
