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BEL2026 Video Game Madness - West Region Four First Matchup: 16 Cocoon vs. 16 Hi-Fi Rush
2026 Video Game Madness - West Region Four First Matchup
East Region Four First Matchup Preview: 16 Cocoon vs. 16 Hi-Fi Rush
THE YEAR OF THE SURPRISE
The year 2023 was already shaping up to be one of the best years in recent gaming history before either of these games existed.
Tears of the Kingdom was coming. Baldur's Gate 3 was coming. Resident Evil 4 Remake had already come and delivered beyond expectations. The lineup was stacked in a way that felt almost unfair to any developer releasing anything else that year, and the conventional wisdom heading into the second half of the calendar was that the major awards and the year-end best-of lists were already spoken for. The big games had arrived and more big games were coming and there was not a lot of room left.
And then, on January 25, 2023, Microsoft held an Xbox Developer Direct showcase.
The event covered several anticipated titles and ran through their features with the usual mix of trailers and developer commentary. And then, at the end, something unusual happened. A game was announced. And it was available to download immediately. Right now. That night. No review embargo. No months of marketing. No buildup of any kind. Just here it is, go play it.
The game was Hi-Fi Rush.
Within hours, the gaming internet was talking about nothing else.
Hi-Fi Rush is a rhythm action game from Tango Gameworks, a studio founded by Shinji Mikami, the creator of Resident Evil, and best known for the survival horror series The Evil Within. Nobody expected a rhythm game from Tango Gameworks. Nobody expected a colorful, cel-shaded, comedic, joyful rhythm game from Tango Gameworks. The studio's entire identity was horror. Dark, atmospheric, deliberate, uncomfortable horror. Making something with this much energy and personality and color was a declaration. It was Tango Gameworks saying we can do this too, and you had no idea.
You play as Chai, a wannabe rock star who ends up with a music player fused to his chest after a botched procedure at a corporation called Vandelay Technologies. The whole world moves to the beat of the music. Enemies attack on the beat. Chai attacks on the beat. The environment pulses with it. Buildings throb. Pipes swing. The world itself is a percussion instrument. The game rewards you for playing in rhythm and gently accommodates you when you miss it, which means it is simultaneously a rhythm game and not a punishing one, a balance that sounds impossible to achieve and that Hi-Fi Rush achieves with complete confidence.
The combat is deep in a way that sneaks up on you. At first it looks like a simple hack-and-slash. You hit things and the music swells and it feels great and you think you understand what the game is. And then you start discovering combos, and assist characters, and environmental interactions, and the beat-based scoring system that rewards precision with exponentially greater damage, and you realize that the game has been quietly building a toolkit of remarkable complexity under a surface of pure accessibility. By the time you reach the late-game, Hi-Fi Rush has become something that rewards mastery without ever demanding it.
It scored an 89 on Metacritic. It won Best Action Game at The Game Awards. The shadow drop worked so completely that it became a case study in how to launch a game. Microsoft had kept the secret, the game had been in development for years and nobody had leaked it, and the decision to release it the moment they showed it generated a kind of goodwill and excitement that a traditional marketing campaign simply cannot manufacture.
There is something worth saying about what it meant for a studio to make something this different from everything it had done before. Tango Gameworks had a reputation. That reputation was horror. Making Hi-Fi Rush was a risk in every sense. It was a different genre, a different tone, a different visual language, a different everything. And it worked because the team made it with genuine love for what they were doing. That love is visible in every frame of the game. Hi-Fi Rush does not feel like a studio proving a point. It feels like a studio having the time of their lives.
And then, in September of the same year, something quieter happened.
Cocoon came out.
It was the debut game from Geometric Interactive, a studio founded by Jeppe Carlsen. That name might not be immediately familiar, but the games associated with him almost certainly are. Carlsen was the lead gameplay designer on LIMBO, the stark, wordless black-and-white puzzle platformer that announced Playdead to the world in 2010, and on INSIDE, the 2016 successor that took everything LIMBO had done and deepened it and expanded it and ended with a sequence that left players speechless. Both of those games were regarded as masterworks of atmospheric design. Both of them established Carlsen as one of the most thoughtful puzzle designers in the industry.
When he left Playdead and founded Geometric Interactive, the expectations in certain corners of the gaming world were significant. The question was not whether his next game would be good. The question was what kind of good it would be.
Cocoon answered that question in ways that even the most enthusiastic advance speculation had not quite anticipated.
The game's central mechanic is simple to describe and genuinely mind-bending to experience. Each world in the game exists inside an orb. You can carry these orbs. You can bring them into other worlds. You can nest worlds inside each other in combinations that create solutions to puzzles that initially seem impossible. The game never explains its rules with words. It teaches entirely through demonstration, each new mechanic introduced in a controlled environment and then combined with previous mechanics in ways that feel both surprising and inevitable.
To play Cocoon is to feel your own understanding being restructured in real time. A puzzle that seems incomprehensible becomes clear the moment you shift your perspective. A solution that appeared impossible reveals itself through the patient application of principles you have already internalized. The game trusts its players completely and rewards that trust with a sense of accomplishment that is genuinely hard to find anywhere else. There is no combat. There is no failure state in the traditional sense. There is only the puzzle and your understanding of it and the extraordinary feeling when those two things align.
It scored a 91 on Metacritic. It won Best Puzzle and Strategy Game at the DICE Awards. In a year that included Baldur's Gate 3 and Tears of the Kingdom and Alan Wake 2 and Resident Evil 4 Remake, Cocoon still managed to make people stop and pay attention.
Now here is what makes this matchup genuinely compelling.
Both of these games came from developers who had something specific to prove. Tango Gameworks had a genre identity and a reputation that said one thing about what they were capable of. Hi-Fi Rush said something else entirely and proved it. Jeppe Carlsen had a legacy associated with other people's studios and other people's visions. Cocoon was the first time his name was on the door and it was his design philosophy on its own terms from start to finish.
Both games also share something in how they sit in the memory of people who played them. They are recommenders. People who play Hi-Fi Rush tell their friends about it. People who play Cocoon describe it in a way that makes other people want to experience it without being told too much. Both games create advocates, which is the highest compliment you can pay a game outside of the review score.
The East bracket is where this tournament gets interesting. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the 1 seed with 151 critic reviews, the most of any game in the 2024 class. Balatro is the 2. Resident Evil Requiem is the 3. Persona 5 is the 5. The East has depth at every seed line and very few easy matchups.
Both of these games surprised the world once already. On March 18, one of them gets the chance to do it again.
