Recent reviews by Unserious Business

Do you like bugs? Do you like being a bug? Do you like collecting robot friends? Do you like losing robot friends when they fulfill their purpose? Do you like everything being bugs, robots, or bug-robots?

If so, COCOON might be for you.

COCOON is a short-ish game, and its puzzles are more along the lines of “every puzzle introduces a new idea which you have to discover to solve” than “introduce a new idea and then use it many times in combination with others”. I think it is best taken as being about the journey through its worlds and not greatly a puzzle game; in this way, it reminds me a lot of one of my other favorites, GRIS. And if you want more, much harder, worlds-within-worlds puzzles, then check out Recursed.

Short; cute; polished UI; a nice thing to play in one day.

I have one complaint, which is that towards the second half of my playthrough, the excavation phase became more "click on any dirt until enough stuff happens" than interesting strategizing about where to dig. It would have been nice if there was either some more puzzle-ness to later excavations, or eventually an "auto-dig mode" upgrade that lets you just watch it go.

Like many others, I found this game because I was looking for more like The Room series; I was disappointed. The primary problem is that the puzzles are too simple. You will be doing one of these three things most of the time:

• Find the key object and put it in the matching hole. (There are no tools or reused items.)
  
• Find the hidden slide latch to open a door.
  
• Various tile-shuffling puzzles.

Basically all of my time playing this game was clicking through the obvious next step to take and waiting for the animations to play out; there was no real challenge, nothing to make me have to actually think about how to solve the box as opposed to merely the next step in getting some tiles in the right order.

I was not impressed with the art, either. Yes, it's reasonably polished, but it doesn't cohere; every box has a theme (electrical, nautical, train, Greek, Aztec, Egyptian…) but they mostly don't relate to the kinds of things you have to do, to each other, or to the story, and overall I found everything too Generic Video Game Fantastical/Magical.

One thing I did like is that you don't have to double-click everything like The Room; a single click is all you need to zoom in. This makes searching for things to do much less frustrating.

Of all the games I've played, The Witness is the one which I wish I could completely forget — so that I could discover its secrets all over again.

This is a really pretty game. One of my first impressions was that the walking speed was a bit slow for getting places and platforming, but actually just right for watching the level background art as you're also playing.

Later in the game the movement mechanics are very good and feel fluid, powerful, and aesthetic. I was slightly disappointed that the first ability ("heavy") was not used very creatively in later levels, but that's a minor complaint.

Progression through the game is linear. After completion, you can jump to old chapters and collect secrets you missed, but you don't have abilities you gained later.

The puzzles are not particularly hard. While mechanically this is sort of a puzzle platformer, I think it is best thought of as interactive art. If you want challenges, the game will be over too soon; it's best experienced with a generous amount of stopping to smell the roses, or at least watch them, and listen to the sounds of birds and bells, and go places just because they're pretty.

It's not as much of a physics puzzle as I was hoping, but it was fun for the two hours it took me to finish and collect a few achievements.

Most of the gameplay is finding the right order to collect things in. The time you have the most choices of different kinds of actions is when you are able to fire things back out of the hole and that happens in last-in-first-out order so there's a bit of getting rid of the items you don't want to get the items you do.

There's a fair number of “funny interaction” moments (like collecting corn and fire and ending up with your hole producing popcorn) but they're mostly unavoidable parts of the solution rather than “what happens if I try this?”.

Buy it for the stuff falling down a hole, not for the puzzles.

Go play the Flash game “The Codex of Alchemical Engineering”. If you liked that concept, buy this game; it has much more elaborate goals and tools and a refined user interface with plenty of shortcuts.