Geometric InteractiveComplex rules in games often mean complex explanations. Before you can conquer the world in Crusader Kings, you need to spend a lot of time learning the intricacies of international diplomacy and conflict, and familiarize yourself with the dozens of levers you’ll need to pull to control them. But other times, complexity is something that rolls out gradually, surprising you with the layers contained within simple seeming games until it almost feels like you’ve discovered a secret you weren’t meant to see.The complexity of Cocoon is the latter kind. Developer Geometric Interactive, founded by the gameplay designer of Limbo and Inside, released Cocoon as its first game in 2023, marking an immediate break from the designer’s early sidescrolling puzzle games. Now, it’s heading to PlayStation Plus, and it’s worth exploring this fascinating world.Cocoon starts without a single word of explanation, putting you in control of a skittering, beetle-like creature in an orange-hued desert. There’s not a single tutorial or even button prompt in the game, letting you figure out for yourself how to navigate its bizarre logic. The wordless way Cocoon communicates everything from its basic controls to its most involved challenges can feel like magic, but it all comes down to how it smartly places puzzles for you to work out one by one and the elegant way the rules of the world build on one another.For the first few minutes of Cocoon, you’ll flip switches and pull boxes to make paths, which is typical enough, but it quickly introduces the key to its unique puzzles. Upon interacting with a particular machine, your insectoid character leaps up, not just into the sky but out of the world entirely. Leaving behind the orange desert you started in, you find yourself in a darker, more barren space, with the entirety of the world you just left contained in an orb in front of you. You can pick the entire world up and haul it around, and in fact doing so is at the heart of Cocoon’s most interesting puzzles.The world-containing orb can be used to power switches in this new environment, and it has an ambient effect on the new world around it — in this case, causing bridges to appear within an aura of orange light it projects. Find a machine like the one that sent you here, and you can place the orb inside, jumping back into that original world.Cocoon is a mind-bending puzzle game about leaping through worlds. | Geometric InteractiveAs Cocoon goes on, you’ll find even more devices that send you up or down a level through its multiple nested worlds. Where once you had a single set of environmental puzzles to solve to navigate the desert world, by the end of the game you have a handful of separate worlds to explore, each with their own puzzles to solve and each interacting with every other one at the same time. An impassable door in one world might be opened in another level, and diving briefly into an orb and back out can help you avoid enemies and other dangers. With more than one orb in hand, you can even choose how to layer them, with sometimes surprising effects depending on the order in which you nest each world.Conceptually, Cocoon is mind-boggling. The idea of jumping between worlds, then carting around an entire plane of existence on your back is tricky enough before you even take into account the ways orbs behave in each level and how you can affect one world while looking down at it from another. But what makes Cocoon so special is that it never feels overwhelming. The ability to jump to a different set of puzzles in another world is strangely liberating, always giving you another place to look for solutions if you hit a dead-end in one stage. And since the intricacies of its puzzle design are doled out slowly over the course of the game, you have time to think through each strange twist of reality before you’re confronted with another. Cocoon is a game that resists easy explanations, instead asking you to immerse yourself in its unique worlds and reach for unconventional solutions, making it one of the most fascinating puzzle games in years.Cocoon is available now on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC.