The unexpected dread of Cocoon: how the bug became a feature

It took Geometric Interactive a while to find the insect in Cocoon, though it’s perhaps more accurate to say that the insect found Cocoon, pupating of its own accord from the texture of this delightful but oh so eerie top-down puzzle-platformer. “When I joined the studio, the demo was just like, 2D pixels with blocks,” says Erwin Kho, art director. “The little character that you’re moving around was a white box with sort of a brown basket on their back. And I think we all gravitated towards sci-fi, so I just immediately started doing things with astronauts or robots.

“And at some point, I had this little astronaut character that I thought was a bit disappointing, because, you know – it’s just a person with a helmet and a golden visor. So I gave him a little cape, because capes are cool. But a lot of videogame characters have a cape, so I thought, maybe I’ll just split it in two or something. And with the cape split in two, it suddenly looks like wings.”

“Your choice with the character eventually sparked the idea for what this entire thing is about, kind of?” interjects game director and designer Jeppe Carlson, otherwise known as the lead gameplay designer for PlayDead’s Limbo – a game which, it only now occurs to me, starts in a forest prowled by an enormous spider. “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.”