DESIGNER-STUDY · 2026-06-13
Inside Jeppe Carlsen's Philosophy — Puzzles Built on Trust
Limbo, Inside, COCOON, and countering complexity with simplicity
Introduction
When I read a designer, the first thing I do is count how many times they say the same thing in different words. Consistency is evidence of a conviction that runs deeper than the person is even aware of. Jeppe Carlsen is an easy subject in this respect: across multiple interviews, his claims barely waver.
This site already carries a soundtrack piece and a counter-review of COCOON (2023). The terrain around the work has been mapped. What remains is the person who designed it. This is not a game write-up; it is a study of Carlsen built only from three primary sources whose text I have checked: a maker interview at Remap (Nov 2023), an interview at Push Square (June 2023), and an interview at PreMortem Games (Sept 2024). Every quotation is verified against the original.
Background — Eight years at Playdead, ten people in Copenhagen
Jeppe Carlsen was the lead gameplay designer at Denmark's Playdead on Limbo (2010) and Inside (2016). "During my 8 years at Playdead, I refined my puzzle-designing skills a lot," he recalls (Push Square, 2023), and it is that experience he describes carrying into what came next.
After leaving Playdead, he co-founded Geometric Interactive in Copenhagen with audio designer Jakob Schmid — a ten-person studio. The two had earlier made the rhythm puzzle platformer 140 together, and "we are both interested in integrating music systems with the game design" (PreMortem Games, 2024). The studio's line is plain: "At Geometric we put gameplay first, and we will always build our games around strong gameplay ideas" (ibid.).
Their first full-length work is COCOON, released in 2023 after six and a half years of development. "What if entire worlds are contained within small orbs that you can pick up and enter to explore... And what if you bring these orbs into each other, effectively making you rearrange and explore a hierarchy of worlds within worlds" — that idea, which "one day simply popped up" (PreMortem Games, 2024), was the starting point.
Philosophy — "Trust" and "playability"
Lay Carlsen's statements side by side and two words keep arriving at the center. One is "trust." "I think trust is very important when it comes to puzzle games. If I play a puzzle game and I get stumped, then the game needs to have established that solutions are always fair and logical, and that the reward for solving the puzzles feels proportional to the efforts I put into solving them" (Remap, 2023). He adds that he has "a very low tolerance for puzzle games that do not create this level of trust" — the moment he is stumped without trusting the game, he moves on.
The other is "playability." "The one thing I never compromise on is playability. The art, sounds, and animation need to communicate the puzzle logic effectively" (PreMortem Games, 2024). Note how he subordinates beauty and sound to logic, as instruments of communication. I read these two — "trust" in 2023 and "playability" in 2024 — not as separate claims but as two faces of one conviction. Designing so the player never feels treated unfairly is what produces trust; making the logic legible is what sustains it.
Obsessions — Hitting complexity back with simplicity
Three recurring gestures run through Carlsen's work. First: the more complex a thing is, the simpler it must be made. "Exploration and puzzles in a hierarchy of worlds within worlds is inherently somewhat complex, and I wanted to counter that complexity by making the game very accessible" (Push Square, 2023). The conclusion was a control scheme of one stick and one button — folding a complex idea into an input so simple the fingers forget it. I take this to be a habit of his since 140.
Second: an obsession with feedback for wrong answers. "Each wrong attempt at solving a puzzle needs to very clearly give the feedback that the solution did not work, that it never will work (with repeated attempts), and why it won't work" (Remap, 2023). He polishes the wrong attempts as much as the right one, observing through heavy playtesting what mistaken solutions players invent.
Third: the question "why is this room here?" Over development he came to judge a puzzle not only by whether it is fun or hard but by "why is this puzzle here, what is its purpose?" (PreMortem Games, 2024). A puzzle might be satisfying and a decent challenge while also connecting the player to the world and priming them for a more interesting puzzle later. What I find telling is how little this holistic framing changes between the 2023 and 2024 interviews.
Failures and how he got past them — the pain of cutting, the discovery that you can
The "failures" Carlsen discusses publicly are mostly about cuts. In Push Square (2023) he describes a "transporter" — a large creature you could climb, pilot, and dock at "puzzle islands" to gather components and eventually make fly. "It was a cool concept, and unfortunately we got really far with art, animations, everything, before I realized that the pacing in this section was simply off." Because COCOON flows by never staying in one world too long, this poorly-planned stretch was cut entirely. "It always hurts to cut content, especially when other team members have worked on that content for a long time."
In Remap (2023) he describes cutting another large area — painful "since we had gotten pretty far with it," but decided on different grounds: "it was cut simply because I observed that we could cut it — the house of cards did not fall when removing it, which makes me ask: why is it then here to begin with?" Here I see the core of how he handles failure: he acknowledges the pain, then rules with structure rather than sentiment. A wall that does not bring the house down is a wall you do not need — a cold logic.
Design dilemmas — accessibility versus complexity, and the cost to the team
Carlsen names two dilemmas in his own words. The first is the tightrope of keeping a complex idea while making it accessible. COCOON's core — "worlds within worlds" — can easily overwhelm. "We introduce and expand on concepts very gently, and never overwhelm the player with too many orb worlds available at the same time" (Push Square, 2023), and he built a "mental staircase" of difficulty, inspecting each step — "is this the most gentle I can be, or should I move this puzzle further up the staircase?" (Remap, 2023). There is a standing tension here: keep the fun of complexity, yet leave no one behind.
The second dilemma is more human. To make a good game you must cut content — but that content holds months of the team's work. The two cuts above were, by design logic, correct; yet he keeps putting the pain into words. I read this as a tension he has not fully resolved. The logic of structure (a wall that doesn't fall isn't needed) and the ethic of collaboration (how to treat your colleagues' labor) do not appear to be cleanly reconciled even within him.
Influences — Nintendo, Playdead, and a partner's sound
Here are the influences Carlsen himself acknowledges, with no speculation. First, Nintendo. "My favorite game of all time is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which I consider an adventure game but also a puzzle game. It completely changed my gaming preferences and introduced me to everything Nintendo" (Remap, 2023). His example is a small staging beat: enter the first boss arena and something stirs at the ceiling; point the camera up and it snaps into a zoom revealing the boss's eye. "Small details like this feel rather sophisticated even when examined today." His knack for pairing logical clarity with delicate staging is rooted here.
Next, the eight years at Playdead. Since he says he "refined my puzzle-designing skills a lot" on Limbo and Inside (Push Square, 2023), this is less an influence than a formative period. And his partner, Jakob Schmid: their game 140 wove rhythm and puzzle together, and "we are both interested in integrating music systems with the game design" (PreMortem Games, 2024). COCOON's sound functioning as part of the design sits on the line of that long collaboration.
Kizuki's reading
From here on is my own reading as Kizuki, a step beyond what Carlsen said; he did not say these things himself. I read him as a rare kind of designer who places not "difficulty" or "cleverness" but "trust" at the very top. Where many puzzle authors compete over how hard they can make a solver gasp, Carlsen's starting point is how to keep his promises to the solver. Fairness, reward proportional to effort, an honest answer even to wrong moves — these read like the clauses of a contract with the player.
And the "house of cards" metaphor captures his temperament well. He is less an artist than a structural engineer: if pulling one card doesn't topple the house, that card was a lie. So I read his highest design act as subtraction, not addition. The transporter, the large area — he pulled them, reluctantly, because pulling them did not bring the house down. If this reading is right, the thing to watch in his next work is not what he newly stacked, but what he managed to keep to the end — for that should mirror how he chooses his "walls that do not fall."
Closing — where to start
If you want to understand Carlsen the person, start with COCOON. With its single-button control, you feel the difficulty "staircase" and the "design of trust" in your hands, as a solver. Then go back to Inside to see where his Playdead-era knack for conveying logic without words came from. Go back further to 140 and you meet the prototype of music-times-design with his partner Jakob Schmid.
As related routes, this site's COCOON soundtrack piece and COCOON counter-review approach the designer from the side of the work. As designer studies, reading him alongside Jonathan Blow (on the single point of trusting the solver's intelligence) and Lucas Pope (on choosing density over volume) should sharpen his outline.
Sources
Primary sources referenced in this article (all quotations checked against the text):
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