Like COCOON, Geometric Interactive’s second game will be published by Annapurna, the two announced at the showcase. Audio director and composer Jakob Schmid also revealed that it will be “unlike anything we’ve ever worked on before,” though he didn’t provide any specifics.

Before COCOON, members of Geometric Interactive’s development team were part of Playdead, where they worked on Limbo and Inside. That their next title will be entirely different from each of those games doesn’t tell us much, but that track record does create some intrigue. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before more details are shared. Stay tuned until further announcements and updates.

A total of 56 games are nominated across all categories, with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 leading the way with nine nominations in total. It is followed by Alan Wake 2 with eight nominations, Baldur’s Gate 3 with seven, and Cocoon with six. All four are also nominated for the Game of the Year category, alongside The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which is nominated in five categories in total.

The 27th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards are scheduled for February 15, and will be hosted by Kinda Funny’s Greg Miller and IGN’s Stella Chung. Stay tuned for updates on which games come out as the big winners of the ceremony.

You can check out the full list of nominees in all categories below.

Outstanding Achievement in Animation

• Final Fantasy 16
• Hi-Fi Rush
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
• Mortal Kombat 1
• Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction

• Alan Wake 2
• Hogwarts Legacy
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
• Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
• Starfield

Outstanding Achievement in Character

• Alan Wake 2 – Saga Anderson
• Baldur’s Gate 3 – Astarion
• Baldur’s Gate 3 – Karlach
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 – Miles Morales
• Thirsty Suitors – Jala

Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition

• Alan Wake 2
• Diablo 4
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
• Planet of Lana
• Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Outstanding Achievement in Audio Design

• Alan Wake 2
• Cocoon
• Hi-Fi Rush
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
• Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Outstanding Achievement in Story

• Alan Wake 2
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Dave the Diver
• Thirsty Suitors
• Venba

Outstanding Technical Achievement

• Alan Wake 2
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
• Hogwarts Legacy
• The Finals
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Action Game of the Year

• Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon
• Dead Space
• Hi-Fi Rush
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
• Remnant 2

Adventure Game of the Year

• Alan Wake 2
• Cocoon
• Dave the Diver
• Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Family Game of the Year

• Disney Illusion Island
• Fae Farm
• Hello Kitty Adventure Island
• Midnight Girl
• Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Fighting Game of the Year

• Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising
• Mortal Kombat 1
• Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2
• Pocket Bravery
• Street Fighter 6

Racing Game of the Year

• F-Zero 99
• Forza Motorsport
• Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 – Turbocharged
• LEGO 2K Drive

Role-Playing Game of the Year

• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
• Diablo 4
• Final Fantasy 16
• Starfield

Sports Game of the Year

• EA Sports FC 24
• MLB The Show 23
• WWE 2K23

Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year

• Against the Storm
• Cobalt Core
• Dune: Spice Wars
• The Last Spell
• Wartales

Immersive Reality Technical Achievement

• Asgard’s Wrath 2
• Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR
• Horizon Call of the Mountain
• Vertigo 2
• We Are One

Immersive Reality Game of the Year

• Asgard’s Wrath 2
• Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR
• Horizon Call of the Mountain
• Vampire: The Masquerade – Justice
• Vertigo 2

Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game

• Cocoon
• Dredge
• El Paso, Elsewhere
• Thirsty Suitors
• Venba

Mobile Game of the Year

• Gubbins
• Hello Kitty Island Adventure
• Honkai: Star Rail
• Terra Nil
• WHAT THE CAR?

Online Game of the Year

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
• Diablo 4
• Omega Strikers
• Street Fighter 6
• The Finals

Outstanding Achievement in Game Design

• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Cocoon
• Dave the Diver
• Super Mario Bros. Wonder
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction

• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Cocoon
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
• Super Mario Bros. Wonder
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Game of the Year

• Alan Wake 2
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Cocoon
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

COCOON sees players investigating different environments and tinkering with machines abandoned by an ancient civilization. They’ll discover orbs which have self-contained worlds but also provide unique abilities and are used to solve different puzzles like activating switches and uncovering hidden paths. Of course, there are also boss battles against guardians.

Perhaps the biggest claim to fame for COCOON is that Limbo and Inside lead gameplay designer Jeppe Carlsen is involved. You can check out our review for more details on the gameplay and how it fares. We awarded it an 8 out of 10, praising the visuals and mechanics but criticizing some of the more esoteric puzzles.

And I would be lying if I said that it didn’t work out quite well. Going into the game as a fan of both Limbo and Inside, I thought I would see similar throughlines in COCOON, and while those similarities are there in terms of how the game prefers to use its environments and animations to tell its story rather than throwing exposition the player’s way, COCOON manages to differentiates itself from its predecessors in a number of ways, not least of which is the game’s use of color.

COCOON is an incredibly bright and colorful game, and while its story isn’t altogether as cheerful or happy as its visuals might at first indicate, the game definitely feels a lot more uplifting than its gruesome predecessors. One of the most interesting things about COCOON is how it punishes the player for messing up. You can’t really die in COCOON. And while this might essentially come off as a pedantic difference at best, since getting hit in a boss fight means you get thrown back to right before entering the arena, essentially resetting the fight, the fact that the game never really outright “kills” you goes a long way in encouraging exploration.

When it comes to gameplay, COCOON relishes in its sheer simplicity. There are only two things you can really do in the game—move and interact. Interaction is highly context sensitive, and where you press the interact button can have different effects depending on the kind of thing you’re interacting with. For example, interact with an orb and you’ll just pick it up. Put the orb in a specific pedestal and hold down the interact button, however, and you’ll end up entering the orb. There are a host of other things you can do, like pulling objects and activating switches, but the game doesn’t really bog you down with a high number of verbs.

While the controls might come off as quite simple, however, the puzzle designs in COCOON can often feel downright ingenious. With little more than the ability to pick up or drop an orb and activate a switch, there’s a small puzzle in the early section of the game where you have to race against your orb going through pipes in order to hit the right switches and make sure that the orb goes the right way, allowing you to ultimately pick the orb up in the right spot and letting you continue with your exploration.

"COCOON relishes in its sheer simplicity."

Speaking of orbs, COCOON’s big gimmick is that it revolves around having entire worlds inside orbs. Early on, you only have to manage a single orb, entering which takes you to a desert world filled with ancient technological ruins and an incredibly angry moth-like monster. Since these opening sections essentially act as an unobtrusive tutorial, the puzzles are relatively simple, and largely revolve around figuring out how to cross, say, a destroyed bridge.

It’s after you beat the first “boss” of the game—the aforementioned angry moth—that COCOON starts kicking things into high gear. Beating the boss essentially unlocks the desert orb’s special ability that can be used in the world outside the orb. In this case, the orb gets the ability to create hidden paths that can only be traversed if you’re carrying the orb with you.

COCOON has the tendency to take single ideas that might sound simple from the outset, and take them to situations where the ideas can get fully explored, especially as it starts introducing more orbs, each with their own bespoke ability, into the mix. The second orb, for instance, lets you travel vertically through stone pillars. For the sake of spoilers, I won’t go into detail about future orbs beyond the second one.

"COCOON’s big gimmick is that it revolves around having entire worlds inside orbs."

Aside from the fact that each orb has its own special ability, it’s also worth noting that each orb also has its own world that is specially themed, each with its own set of challenges to overcome, puzzles to solve, and bosses to beat. Without going into too many spoiler-heavy details, all I’ll say about the boss fights is each one is wonderfully unique, which is quite an accomplishment for a game that doesn’t really have a combat system aside from “pick up bomb” and “explode bomb”.

The big limitations that players have to figure out is that they can only carry a single orb at a time. While this isn’t really a big deal when it comes to transporting multiple orbs, since you can put orbs within orbs within orbs, leading to a stack of worlds within worlds, where this truly becomes challenging is figuring out what kind of orb you’ll need to make use of to solve puzzles in the overworld.

Not all is well and rosy in the world of COCOON, however, especially when it comes to some of its puzzle designs. While most puzzles in the game are rather simple once you figure them out, some puzzles tend to hide clues to solving them in the overworld with rather obscure hints. An early example that I found myself stuck on for an embarrassing amount of time revolved around figuring out the right order of musical switches to hit, with the order being clearly shown on a nearby pillar. While this largely comes down to my own mistakes in not noticing the symbols on the pillar, future puzzles only start getting more obscure with their hints. For example, another similar puzzle revolves around finding the right order of switches on a nearby hidden platform that can only be seen if you’re holding the desert orb.

"COCOON has the tendency to take single ideas that might sound simple from the outset, and take them to situations where the ideas can get fully explored."

Some of the game’s puzzles can also start feeling more tedious than clever, especially when the game has you constantly run back and forth across platforms to hit switches in different order just to understand all the tools at your disposal. Rather than making the player feel clever, these puzzles felt more like they could just easily be solved by brute forcing through the relatively short number of permutations between the switches.

Some puzzle designs aside, COCOON feels like one of the best puzzle-solving games to have come out in quite some time. Its visuals and ambient music do an excellent job of creating a chill atmosphere while you’re solving puzzles, while at the same time easily ramping up the pressure when you take on a boss fight. The game’s minimalistic approach to storytelling also never feels overbearing, and its simple concepts and controls get taken to quite interesting extremes once you zoom out a bit and get a better picture of the world you inhabit, as well as the world you carry on your back.

This game was reviewed on PC.

Developed by Geometric Interactive, COCOON is about exploring worlds within worlds. You can carry an orb on your back and leap inside it to explore an entirely different world. While tinkering with them is the key to solving puzzles, you’ll also traverse the “real” world and its various biomes, exploring the ruins of a civilization long past and trying to piece things together.

Orbs have different abilities usable across various worlds, from showcasing hidden paths to triggering switches. Be warned, though – each has a Guardian that you must fight in extensive battles with unique mechanics. What is happening in the various worlds, and can you unravel the greater mystery? We’ll find out when it launches in September, so stay tuned for more details.

COCOON is a top-down puzzle adventure game that is set inside “a structure of worlds within worlds”, with entire worlds existing inside of small orbs. Players will be tasked with using these orbs to hop between worlds which will also involve combining, manipulating, and rearranging them to solve puzzles.

The game also promises several diverse and interconnected biomes, “from industrial structures to
massive organic caverns.” Each world is protected by a mighty guardian, and battling each one of them will require a different skill. Check out the gameplay trailer below.

COCOON is due out sometime in 2023 for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. It will also be available via Game Pass at launch. With the Annapurna Interactive Showcase set for next month, hopefully, we’ll be seeing more of the game not long from now.