Cocoon is a brain melting turtles-all-the-way-down puzzle game. Imagine your standard buttons to open doors puzzles, where you put an item in a certain place to make a door open or a platform move. Now, make it so that the item you moved is actually a container, which you can enter. Inside, is another world, with it’s own series of puzzles

Complicate that further, by having several of these items, which can be carried inside of each other. And, sometimes, you need to use an interior puzzle as a piece in an exterior puzzle. For example, there’s a bit where a device shoots out a ball over and over. You need to complete an interior puzzle to make the ball exit that puzzle in a certain direction to end up in the exterior world to be part of that puzzle.

Brain melted yet? Well, now make it so there’s a puzzle within that puzzle.

Frankly, I’m amazed I came out of it without goo leaking from my ears. It’s proper four dimensional thinking. At one point I was convinced I’d put the green world inside the orange world and the orange world inside the green world causing some sort of paradox but I was mistaken. Not sure I’d have coped if that were possible!

Oh yeah, and there’s boss fights too, which are also sort of puzzles in their own right. Just in case you needed more puzzles.

This is one of those puzzle games that makes you feel very clever. Not quite as clever as The Witness, perhaps, or Superliminal, which this feels a bit like.

The premise is that in a future where climate change has broken everything, you’ve been put in a VR machine within which some clever people in the past supposedly found a fix for the planet but it was never put in place. You have to find out what it is. It’s sort of like wandering round a shared Mind Palace or something.

What it actually is, because that’s just the framing gimmick, is a series of first person levels where the aim is to reach a device that lets you move on to the next bit. Only it’s always out of reach or needs power or is behind a wall or has a missing cable or is sound activated but the sound-making-device is too far away.

You solve these puzzles initially by making use of photographs you find. These 2D pictures create a 3D object of the photo when used, so for example, you have to get from one platform to another but there’s a big gap. If you stand in the right place, and hold up the photo of a bridge you found nearby in just the right way that it looks like the bridge fills the gap, then magically it does fill the gap.

Later on, you get a camera with which to make your own photos, and various other things – like batteries, a photocopier, pieces of pictures you have to line up, and walls of a certain colour that can’t be photographed (or “printed over” with a photograph) complicate things.

It’s not especially long, but it has plenty of clever ideas along the way. I also appreciated some of the trophies. They reward for trying to do stupid things. For example, there’s a bit where you need three batteries to power an exit, but you only have one battery. Naturally, you take a photo of the battery and then that photo gives you a second battery. My mind then thought… wait. I’ve more shots left on this camera. Took a photo of both batteries, then all four batteries and so on. Got to 32 or 64 batteries and a trophy popped. Amazing.

Seems these days that games I’m interested in playing end up free somewhere if I just wait a while. It Takes Two is one of those titles, as there it is, on PS+++++ (I forget how many +).

It’s a two player co-op title, with players each taking control of a heading-for-divorce couple who, because of magic or something prompted by their young child being upset with Mummy and Daddy arguing, have been turned into toys. You know, standard stuff. Each level they’re individually given different abilities, and you use these together to navigate a very Honey I Shrunk The Kids world, from a garden shed to a greenhouse and a tree.

Guiding you (and, clearly, hindering your progress) is a sentient Book of Love who explains that the obstacles and challenges you face are allegories for the relationship issues you’re having and overcoming them will bring you closer together again. There’s platforming, puzzling, spider-riding, shooting, and a wide variety of situations to deal with along the way, and none of the gimmicks last long enough to become stale. Despite the happy colours and generally upbeat and humorous events, there are some pretty dark places the game goes to, with a level where your “mission” is to set out and “kill” your daughter’s favourite stuffed toy (trigger warning: you cut off a limb and horribly maim a cute elephant who is screaming pleas for you to stop) just to make your girl cry. Horrible.

It’s a very pretty game, but I did find some issues in with the audio. Cut scenes suffered from silence (but only the voices), or sound and video went out of sync. Reading up, some others with the same problems suggested changing the PS5’s audio format from (or to) PCM or other possible options, but no matter the setting it made no difference. Seems it affects other platforms too. Jarring, but I have subtitles on so that helped a bit.

Other than that, it was a great, varied, and sometimes clever game, which works really well as a co-op title.