Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Developer Geometric Interactive
Publisher Annapurna Interactive
Origin Denmark
Release 2023
When Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid left Playdead to make their own games in 2016, after the release of Inside, the aim was to start small. While working on that game, the pair had collaborated on a minimalist platformer called 140, which left them pining for another project on a modest scale. And what could be smaller than Carlsen’s next idea, in which worlds are so tiny you can carry them around? Well, most things, it turned out. From minuscule seeds of inspiration grew a game that took six and a half years to complete, longer than the development period of Inside itself.
The concept at Cocoon’s heart – that these portable worlds would open up to reveal landscapes, with puzzles that require you to nest globes inside one another like Russian dolls – wasn’t one that Carlsen jumped on immediately. But each time he put the idea aside, it would resurface in his mind, and he’d flesh it out more. What if, he wondered, it wasn’t the character that gains new abilities but the orb worlds themselves? After months of such musings, he and Schmid decided the potential was too rich to ignore, and they founded Geometric Interactive.
If the concept was reasonably clear by this point, visualising it was aperspective could do it justice. Topdown “gives the feeling of you jumping, leaping into a world, landing and having freedom, like a 3D game.” He also wanted a change, after and “I was like, ‘I’m not doing another left-to-right kind of game’.” Yet for a time Schmid, whose responsibilities on the game ranged from programming to audio direction, was in the dark. “When Jeppe was describing the game, I didn’t see anything close to what we ended up with,” he says. “I saw it in a firstperson view.” It was only when Carlsen made a prototype that the smoke cleared. “It was like, ‘Oh, there’s a little guy, and you’re moving around. OK, now it makes sense to me’.”
