This co-op platformer was a "boyhood dream" for the self-taught stop-motion animator now directing it, and it might just rival It Takes Two with a more earnest story and action less likely to destroy your relationships

Out of Words makes a great first impression – then an incredible second impression, and a third, until suddenly it becomes clear that this is genuinely something special. Picture a blend of It Takes Two's co-op puzzle-solving and the tightly paced direction of a Limbo or Inside, then wrap it up in an absolutely beautiful stop-motion aesthetic with a genuinely endearing coming-of-age love story at its heart.

You and a co-op partner take on the roles of Kurt and Karla, a pair of kids experiencing their first awkward tastes of love. In a pretty direct metaphor, they promptly lose their mouths and find themselves unable to speak, thrust into a fantasy world where they're going to have to face their feelings in some very literal ways.

It's all hand-crafted from top to bottom. The cutscenes are pure, traditional stop-motion animation, and all the in-game objects and characters are implemented through a custom photogrammetry process. The world is full of whimsy, with fantastical landscapes and little clay men just oozing personality, and there's a fantastic tactile feel to jumping around in puddles and clambering around the world.

A "boyhood dream"

"This is my first game," director Johan Oettinger tells me after a hands-on demo at Summer Game Fest. "It's my boyhood dream to make games, but specifically to combine my other great love: stop motion." With that dream in mind, Oettinger says he taught himself how to do stop-motion, and now heads the Danish animation studio WiredFly.

Oettinger had been building the world of Out of Words "on and off" since 2013, but it was only once he partnered up with development studio Kong Orange that the project properly kicked off. The game was Kickstarted under the title Vokabulantis in 2021, and eventually landed a deal with Epic Games Publishing in 2022, which Oettinger says "opened up all the doors," offering "full creative freedom" alongside support building online play and bringing the game to all platforms.

I bring up all this history to note how much you can feel the enthusiasm Oettinger – and the entire development team – have for this game just pouring off of the whole thing. The concept of a cutesy love story in this format could come off as unbearably saccharine, but everything I've seen manages to be completely endearing with deft and restrained storytelling.

'Deft and restrained' also describes the platforming, which is fully two-dimensional and consists mostly of pretty light challenges. The section where I spent the most time has you tap a button to turn gravity upside down, letting you walk on the ceiling while your co-op partner sticks to the floor, or vice-versa.

You have to coordinate when to make those swaps to get each player to the end of the room, but while the platforming is satisfying, it isn't extremely taxing. Game design lead Jeff Sparks tells me that was an intentional design decision, as the team wants the game to be enjoyable for a large variety of players, from long-time gamers to their kids and partners who might not be so skilled at platformers. As someone with deep regrets about forcing my own partner, a turn-based RPG and cozy gaming fan, to play through It Takes Two with me, Out of Words seems a lot less dangerous to our relationship.

In limbo

Sparks says narrowing the game down to its most fun and accessible parts takes "a lot of iteration." The team starts by asking "what's fun about the mechanic" at its most basic level, and then figuring out how to "onboard players to the mechanic and let them play with it in fun and interesting ways." It's classic platformer design, and it works incredibly well here.

"I love simple games, but I love games where the design is taken very seriously," Oettinger adds. "Where the design is the way that the game is written, you could say, and everything else there is to lift that up as a sum of the parts. Where the animation, in this case stop-motion, lifts the design up, and the handcrafted art direction, the sound design, everything is there to lift the storytelling through level design."

More than anything else, Out of Words reminds me of Playdead's games, with the same careful approach to pacing and level design that made Limbo and Inside so compelling. Those aren't games I invoke lightly, but Out of Words has the juice to stand up to the comparison. And while it might not immediately look like it has the same horror vibes as those titles, that changes deeper within.

After a breezy run through an early chapter, the devs jump me forward to a much later section, where the story has just gone darker with Kurt and Karla's emotions running rampant. Suddenly, you're no longer controlling a pair of kids – instead, they've combined into this weird, awful ball monster with giant, grasping hands.

Here, Out of Words changes from a traditional platformer into a sort of grappling game, where each player controls a hand, grabbing walls to swing forward through a town full of increasingly terrified little clay men. It immediately called to mind the end of Inside, but while it certainly feels like a horrifying change of pace from the normal game, the goofy, exaggerated calls for help from the clay guys cuts the tension in a major way.

Still, that taste of something so different from what Out of Words initially presents itself as has me very excited to see what the rest of the game has in store. The devs envision it as an 8-10 hour experience you can finish over a handful of evenings, and after just 30 minutes with the game I can't wait to see what those hours hold. The fact that my marriage is likely to remain intact at the end of it all is also a particularly nice bonus.

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