So I gave him a little cape, because capes are cool.
And with the cape split in two, it suddenly looks like wings."
“That’s not something we knew from the get-go.
It’s an exploratory process for us to figure out the story of this game?
I think that put us on a good track.”
Kho pushes back on this claim modestly.
“It started with the gameplay that Jeppe came up with.
All the lore that we sort of had for ourselves, it just developed over time.”
You begin the game in a baking desert landscape of flat oranges and delicious, tall shadows.
Each area in the game appears to exist inside its own coloured glass orb.
And also dung beetles, you know, it has this massive ball it’s rolling around.
It’s definitely the right word for Cocoon.
“Slowly, biomechanical components came in,” Kho goes on.
“What is the more organic version of machinery and things that can move?
And so you end up with lots of limbs and stretchy parts.”
Once Cocoon’s world became insectile, it opened itself up to new breeds of puzzle.
It sort of made this game special in my head.
But there’s a dreadfulness to Cocoon that materialises gradually, like the title fonts in Alien.
Kho says that this kind of pervasive unsightliness comes naturally to him as an artist.
“I generally don’t make things too cute.
I have to make a lot of effort to make things, like, Hello Kitty cute.
So, yeah, that atmosphere is something that I just like gravitate towards.”
The premise of warping between cocooned dimensions has even queasier implications.
“Most games, they progress forward or inwards,” notes Carlson.
What else is out there?"
And there’s this weird contrast that happens there which amplifies that sense of oddness."
Insects are well-adapted to navigate such weird contrasts because they’re creatures of contrast themselves, he suggests.
So I think there’s an interesting tension conceptually."
I personally view insects with a mixture of revulsion and wonder.
But I also share Kho’s uncertainty about the extent to which human and insect interrelate.
Nowadays we can follow a tarantula into its burrow and mingle with the hornets inside a nest.
These human invasions seldom work out well for the insect.
But it’s also that the premise of warping between nested dimensions has no theoretical limit.
Am I a bug in a ball, gazing into another ball at another bug carrying another ball?
And if I am, what kind of bug is carrying me?
