Commentary: ‘Cocoon’ Allows A Unique Minimalist Approach To Stories
by Frank Martin
For the most part, stories are a passive experience. The audience sits back and absorbs the material, allowing it to come to them rather than having the audience be an active participant. This is true of almost all forms of storytelling. There are obvious exceptions, the biggest of which is probably video games. However, even then there are stories that unfold on their own without needing the audience to come up with their own interpretations. But there are notable games that have a story but don’t care to explain them. These stories serve more as a backdrop, allowing the gameplay to be front and center while the narrative is either second place or unnecessary entirely.
A great example of this is the platformer Cocoon developed by Geometric Interactive. The main objective of the game is to navigate across levels while solving puzzles to progress. It has no dialogue or words of any kind. There is definitely a story behind its main character and the worlds he has to traverse, but it’s never explained. The player can come up with their own interpretation for what’s happening. Or conversely, the player could not come up with a backstory at all. It doesn’t necessarily matter as the main focus of the game is simply to play while becoming immersed in its environments.
Cocoon is undoubtedly beautiful with a stylistic art design. This style, both in the characters and the levels, allows the player to feel the presence of a story without actually having it explained to them. And more and more games are taking this minimalistic approach to their storytelling. The same can’t be said for a movie or a novel. That doesn’t mean everything has to be explained to the audience. Stories leave things open ended with room for interpretive nuance all the time. But it’s very hard to engage an audience in a minimalistic story that is passive. Video games like Cocoon place their audience in the driver’s seat, giving them the benefits of enjoyable entertainment without the burden of making a story present.
Cocoon is now available on Xbox Game Pass.
