One of Cocoon’s easiest puzzles was the hardest to design
Under cover the aficionado is a puzzle delight. An isometric adventure from Geometric Language separates the game from a mind-bending premise where players jump between worlds to crawl inside an orb. Polygon spoke to designer and director Jeppe Carlsen about making this world’s curious puzzles. In that interview, he made it clear that Under coverBatur, easy to disturb the cam by striking. Are they easy? That was a challenge.
In Under cover, a tiny bug that navigates the dark, twisted world of sci-fi, mixing insectoid organic matter with industrial worlds. The game pretty much presents the player with puzzle after puzzle after puzzle. Carlsen told Polygon that while players would expect to be involved, multi-level puzzles are the designers’ biggest challenge, the opposite often happens.
“Sometimes it worries me that when I play, it feels too elegant and complex and I’m like, ‘Hey, how can someone design this or something like that?’
Early in the game, when players first arrive in the world of industry, it’s a simple puzzle. In it the player finds two revolving doors and two rods. In the last version of the game, all you have to do is use the orb and both sticks to line up the doors to run through the gap there. The solution is so simple that Carlsen describes it as “barely” a puzzle, saying it’s more like an interaction. As it turns out, the puzzle is one of the most complex designs in the entire game.
This riddle has been repeated many times, and it is literally the simplest in the world. It’s funny. The starting puzzle had a different logic to the revolving doors – a bit similar, but different. So at that time, when you put on the pass, both doors were rotated, and when you let go, you had to let go so that the doors would line up in the middle. It seems that people are difficult to find. They want to play for seven minutes or something.
But Carlsen didn’t want it to be a difficult puzzle. And as the fans wanted to proceed through the normal world, without running into so much complexity right away. Polygon said the puzzle just wasn’t interesting enough to warrant such a challenge to players, so the team revised it.
This (puzzle) has been done through so many iterations of different valve systems and different variations of the same puzzle. It took a very long time. And then I thought I had it, but then I couldn’t explain it, and just like that, there are so many versions of the revolving door. It’s become almost like a production joke around those doors. They finally worked, though.”
The iterations of The Gate seem to be all worth it, with Polygon’s review describing the game as “impossibly good”. Under cover is now available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.