In 2016--the same year that Limbo follow-up Inside released to critical acclaim--two of the developers behind Playdead's latest puzzle platformer made a big announcement: They were leaving the company.

Following their work on Inside, lead gameplay designer Jeppe Carlsen and programmer/composer Jakob Schmid decided it was time to forge a new identity and, with it, a new studio. The pair founded Geometric Interactive later that year and began work on Cocoon, an ambitious puzzle game that would be "structurally and fundamentally different" from any game they had worked on before--and, as Carlsen told GameSpot in an exclusive interview, was simply "too fascinating to not do it."

"Initially it was just all these thought experiments about exploring a hierarchy of worlds and how you could manipulate the hierarchy in different interesting ways to build puzzles that had a new way of thinking and a freshness to it," Carlsen said. "Everything started with just that mechanical idea … And every time I thought about it, I was just even more set in stone about, 'This game has to be made. It's too fascinating to not do it.'"