Kong Orange has always been a studio with an interest in the arts and genre-bending interactive experiences. Its first game Heartbeats was a mobile puzzler, visual novel and a Spotify playlist creator. 2019's Felix the Reaper was a collaboration between the studio and several different musicians and dancers. It's not really a surprise then that Out of Words, revealed at Summer Games Fest 2025, combines co-op gameplay with handmade animation and poetry.
Out of Words is actually the idea of Johan Oettinger, founder of animation studio WiredFly, and poet Morten Søndergaard. Oettinger is a filmmaker and much more besides, but he isn't an expert on games, which is why he asked Kong Orange for help all the way back in 2015. As a child, Oettinger became a big fan of stop motion in games, thanks to Neverhood Inc's stop-motion point-and-click adventure, The Neverhood. After having secured money for a stop-motion short film, Oettinger and Søndergaard initially wanted to make both the film as well as a short game but decided to "fully assimilate it into the game" instead.
A tale of two characters
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The story follows Karla and Kurt, two young friends who fall into the world of Vokabulantis after failing to confess their love for each other. There, they no longer have mouths to speak with. This may sound horrible at first, but the two friends are squishy, colorful clay figures who have to work together to make it across a magical land to find their words.
According to lead designer Jeff Sparks, Kurt and Karla's adventure inspired the co-op nature of the Out of Words overall and all of its gameplay mechanics "For us, it was crucial that the game mechanics are conceptually rooted in the narrative," he says. "Emotional, narrative and mechanical interdependence is at the very center of the game design."
Søndergaard holds a special position in the development of the game as not just a game writer, but a game poet, who sees in Out of Words a chance to make another piece of art about love.
"The story was always about the two kids Kurt and Karla, so co-op was there somewhere in the ether of ideas," Søndergaard says. "We obviously love how friendship, feelings and relationships are now at the core of the actual experience of playing. Two people play as two people in the story."
The gravity mechanic revealed in Out of Word's first trailer is a gameplay metaphor for how much Kurt and Karla depend on each other. While one of the pair stays with their feet firmly planted on the ground, the other can reverse gravity and walk on the ceiling to reach areas that were previously impossible to reach.
"This gravity mechanic lets players move through levels in creative and unexpected ways that we think feels really unique and engaging. It also emphasizes cooperation: you and your co-player must rely on each other to overcome challenges and navigate through some tricky spots together," Sparks says, and goes on to suggest that this will be far from the only mechanic you'll be using.
"Ultimately, players should look forward to experimenting with mechanics, puzzles and scenarios that continually evolve alongside the characters themselves," he says.
Out of Words' all-ages themes and co-op gameplay are reminiscent of Hazelight's Studio's big hit It Takes Two. But while the Swedish studio has specialized in cooperative gameplay, for Kong Orange, making a co-op game seemed intimidating at first, as game director Johan Oettinger tells me.
"It was a single player game to begin with, co-op felt incomprehensible production-wise," Oettinger says "Wrongly so, in hindsight, but we were learning as we were going. It was challenging enough to just make the game, also forcing people to play it as co-op felt like a stretch. For quite a while we developed the game primarily as a single player game with potential co-op for those reasons."
"Eventually we threw the towel on the single player. It turned out to be a real blessing for both game design and narrative to focus on co-op only," Ottentinger continues. "Great game experiences just popped out of the team on a daily basis and merged naturally with narrative and visual concepts. It all started to cross-pollinate in a way we had not experienced at that point."
Kong Orange CEO Esben Kjær Ravn adds that while it's cool to work with collaborators from different artistic backgrounds and design completely different games, that approach led to a lengthy learning process for Out of Words.
"We needed to understand what this game would be, and how to make it from the ground up and that took time", Ravn says. "There weren't a lot of design, artistic, narrative or tech lessons from Felix The Reaper that were transferable to Out of Words. And vice versa I should add that WiredFly also developed a lot of new ways to think about and create stop motion in the process."
On the game's YouTube channel, Kong Orange has uploaded a few behind the scenes videos of the process of making a figure, and the combination of physical and digital work does look very special. At the same time, the problems the studio has encountered sound similar to those of Slow Bros., the German studio behind Harold Halibut, which also took over a decade to complete. While he acknowledges the challenges, the way Kjær Ravn speaks about the positives makes me excited to play Out of Words.
"The cool thing about working with a physical and poetic core is the inspiration it generates," he says. "The experience hasn't been one of jarring game development or stop motion limitations, but of how creative challenges grow out of words and become something unique."
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