Hollow Cocoon is a first-person narrative horror game with minimal gameplay limited to solving puzzles and hiding from a scary monster. I've played a good number of these Haunted House Sim games and I rarely love them, but instead treat them as a kind of "comfort" genre (which may sound perplexing to those more sensitive to the scares in these titles). Despite my reservations toward the formulaic and repetitive gameplay, there's just something about a game that's short enough to finish in a night or two with a (hopefully) immersive story and simple enough structure that it won't take too much brain power. I especially like that, with notable exceptions, these games often have interesting, or at least immersive and engaging stories. There's a surprising diversity of stories, settings, and premises in the genre and I really enjoy immersing myself in them for a night. In some ways, these games are like an interactive horror movie for me. While "it's like a movie" is a common criticism for many modern games, this is a genre where I actually appreciate it as an occasional break from my more involved games.

If you followed a few of my reviews on similar "Haunted House Sim" type horror games, you've read this disclaimer a few times. However, even though I'm as tired of typing it as you may be of reading it, I feel it's especially pertinent here. That's because, at least with the above criteria and taste in mind, I think this is my favorite Haunted House Sim I've played. It's definitely got some significant issues that I'll get into and given my feelings on the genre overall, I still wouldn't consider it outstanding overall, but for what I wanted from this kind of game, Hollow Cocoon pretty much nails it.

The main reason the game works for me is that the story is interesting, engaging, well-paced, and easy to follow. Especially for a game I'm just blasting through in a few hours, I find I have a preference for simple but engaging stories. This isn't a genre where I want some kind of complex mind-fuck story with complicated timelines and a huge cast of characters. While there is a bit of a historical timeline and family tree to keep up with, it's both limited in scope and reasonably presented in a way that's easily approachable given its pacing. I count it as a point in this game's favor that I predicted multiple of the game's twists well in advance. I am not usually the type to try and predict twists, so the fact I did at all really just goes to show how invested I was to the point I was connecting the dots simply because I was thinking about the story rather than just reading through it.

The story itself follows your character Minato as he visits the home of his hospitalized grandmother to look after things in her remote 1980's Japanese mountain village home. Unsurprisingly, grandma's house is not safe and is full of strange puzzles hinting at a grander mystery behind Minato's family and their shockingly high mortality rate. Much of the story is told through a number of notes scattered throughout the environments. While at times they're a little long even by the genre's verbose standards, I found they painted a really clear picture of the happenings in the game's backstory and were paced very well to keep me wanting to go on and discover more. Not to mention, there's a very ominous tone to the various revelations as you continue along, reinforced by the danger of the monster pursuing you nearby. I also really appreciated the imagery evoked by the game's lore which gave me potent flashbacks to Kuon, a game I expect either inspired this game or shared a common mythological influence as there are some striking similarities.

I mostly found the presentation of the game pretty strong for an indie title (at least, other than the obvious AI art asset above). In general, the game looks pretty great and the environments are really immersive. I really felt transported to its isolated but lived-in Japanese setting from beginning to end. The sound design is mostly pretty good too, other than the directional effects of the monster's sounds could use a bit more fine-tuning. The monster mostly looks pretty good, especially from afar and in moments of action, though once you get a good look at it, it's admittedly one of the fuzzier assets. Protip: Even though I'm not usually bothered by it, the head bob is pretty bad in this game, but there is a slider in the options so you can turn that off thankfully.

Gameplay is probably the game's biggest weakness to me, despite how simple it is. I personally don't like hide-and-seek mechanics in like almost any of these games. But there are times it's done better and worse than others and this game has a couple flubs, even if it mostly works fine. For one, while the game's a little too short for me to be sure, it seems like the monster's AI might be a little too randomly scripted. While some erratic behavior may be justified for a monster like this that shouldn't be too logical or predictable, one of the most annoying things with gameplay like this to me is a pursuer that may randomly just happen to be stalking outside your hiding place for a long time because the RNG hasn't happened to send it anywhere else. Having that threat linger for a bit outside your cramped hiding cabinet can increase tension, but I find that in excess, especially when it's obvious that you're currently safe, it kind of ruins tension when for long stretches I'm just sitting there staring at the screen and waiting for the monster's sound cues to die down, sighing to myself. While it wasn't nearly as bad as for instance White Day (which epitomizes this problem), it was still noticeable and made the game take a bit longer for the worst reasons. Further, while the chases after being spotted are mostly okay, they could be a touch frustrating. The monster feels just a little too perceptive, and a little too fast, and there are just a touch too few hiding places. I'm purposely using qualifiers there as I really didn't have as big of an issue with this, but there were some times when the chases felt more frustrating than tense. Much of this is mitigated by the fact that, at least on Normal which I played on, healing was pretty generous throughout the game and the monster doesn't just one-shot you or anything. Also in its favor, the early game of Hollow Cocoon was the first time in a long time I found myself legitimately tensed up and a little scared while playing one of these games. This sensation was admittedly short-lived, but considering I've become pretty jaded on that kind of thing, it was cool to experience some of that adrenaline again.

On a lighter note that doesn't really affect my rating but is just kind of funny: the game features some pretty random bonus side content. Throughout the game you'll find these little mini-game arcade machines as well as ¥10 coins that allow you an attempt at them. These games are a little fun for a couple quick attempts, though they're fairly difficult and frustrating to actually win, which merely nets you a little bar of "points" that obviously seemed to be some kind of collection achievement thing. So I played each game variation as we found them, but wasn't super worried about winning a bunch of them. Since I was playing on stream, naturally one of my friends kept teasing me about how I was missing out on unlocking bonus content by earning more points, allowing us to give the monster cute glasses and cosmetics or something, which I laughed off, because obviously that's ridiculous. So anyway:

Hollow Cocoon isn't a game that's going to be hitting my game of the year list anytime soon. And truthfully, it's kind of hard to rate as I think there's a sense in which I wouldn't consider any of this genre to be above 3 stars for me and most of them would be 2 stars. I really only rate it so highly because of the particular itch it scratches for me, which is hard to quantify into a comparative rating. But if what I tend to like out of these games aligns with what you're up for, then I'd definitely recommend Hollow Cocoon. If you're tired of this rather repetitive genre however, you're unlikely to find anything fresh of interest here. I would add the caveat that this game—at least at the time of writing—is still pretty new (it came out in December 2023), so the price is a little steep for a game that'll likely take you about 2-3 hours. There are multiple endings, offering some potential replay value, though I honestly never find hide-and-seek games compelling enough for multiple playthroughs and I'm not sure how many of them can be reached by just reloading a save or how much that really changes the assessment. Either way, I'm quite glad I played this game and would consider it a gem of the subgenre.