The two main characters of Out of Words are young teens who are falling in love in a coming-of-age story. But then disaster strikes as they lose their mouths. They try to talk but can’t anymore. Their mouths are sewn shut.

And so begins Out of Words, a co-op platformer adventure. Of all the games that I saw at the Summer Game Fest, this one was the best. The goal of the game is to find the lost voices of the puppet-animated characters. But unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for a while.

It’s coming out in 2026 on the PC via the Epic Games Store PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. It’s the first game for Johan Oettinger, game director for Out of Words. The developers are Kong Orange and WiredFly, and its even got a poet, Morten Søndergaard, who penned the poems in the game.

At the Epic Games booth at the Summer Game Fest Play Days, I met with Oettenger and executive producer Esben Kjær Ravn. I played the game with Oettenger, and the co-op platformer adventure immediately reminded me of HazeLight’s game of the year from a few years ago, It Takes Two. The game did its best to remind me how a great game can marry its story with its gameplay mechanics.

Like in HazeLight’s game, you have a couple with some troubles. In this case, they can’t speak to each other. But while It Takes Two was a split-screen game, Out of Words has a single screen for both players because, Oettenger said, the aim is to make people feel the same experience together.

Together with a friend, via online cross-platform or couch co-op, you can explore a wild, colorful realm as Kurt and Karla in a story about the first time they held hands — where everything you see is crafted by hand.

Origins

Based on an idea from Søndergaard, Oettinger of Kong Orange began working on the game about 10 years ago in 2015. But he had never made a game before and didn’t know how to do it. He only had an idea that he wanted to make a game based on hand-crafted art using stop-motion animation techniques.

They carefully designed and crafted each stop-motion character, environment and co-op mechanic to tell a story with a distinctly human touch.

It’s a journey built for two where you have to solve physics-defying puzzles in ancient catacombs and perform daring stunts among the clay skyscrapers of Nounberg. If you mess up, one of the characters dies. Then you try again. The adventure will require cooperation, communication and perfect timing between players and their co-player.

The story is about finding your words. The world is at stake — and so is your relationship. Kurt and
Karla become entangled in a battle for the future of the world and their friendship itself. Traverse the wonders and dangers being Out of Words while falling in love. Kurt and Karla may save this wonderland — but at what cost?

“It’s about love. It’s a coming-of-age story, and you play either as Kurt or Karla,” Oettinger said in our play session. “You have to play together, either online or like we are doing now, sitting next to each other, cross platform with a friends pass. The dream is to bring people together and experience it.”

He also said, “The game design is designed to to accommodate the story, to accommodate how the characters are feeling, and so the players will feel the same. When the camera gets close in the cut scenes, you can really sense the fidelity of the craft.”

The gameplay

It’s a game with a variety of mechanics to support the story. It takes place in a fabricated world, built first in the real world and then transferred into the game. The team built characters in real life and then captured their movements through stop-motion animation.

“Everything is touched by a human hand,” he said, as police helicopters flew over our heads in Los Angeles and sirens were going off in the distance. “It’s scanned with lighting or photogrammetry and brought into the Unreal Engine. We use classical keyframe animation, but a lot of is also animated through code.

I picked up the controller and started to play with Johan.

“I’ve been doing a lot of other things, but it is a dream come true. My childhood dream was to make stop motion animation,” Oettinger said.

We started playing in the second chapter of the game, and it was like walking right into Alice in Wonderland. In the first chapter, the two friends are best friends, talking about everything and getting into a high-stakes competition. They’re coming of age, and they want to say how they feel about each other, but they can’t find the words.

“And in this split second of doubt, they lose their mouths,” . Their lips crack off. They’re sucked into their inner world of friendship, their world, their language, which is in a bit of a crisis. They fall.”

He added, “Their friendship is manifested in a cute flying creature. It’s a symbol of their friendship, and that turns out to the player to be the key to changing their inner world. You realize that the characters and players go through a whole fantastical journey into a classical fairy tale.”

The gameplay in the second chapter is fairly mellow, where you play in a side-scrolling platformer style, moving through the landscape together. You can see the grass is painted paper when you look up close.

“Everything is made by hand,” he said. “The water is a gelatin. Cliffs are stacks of book pages.”

Then we came upon a vantage point and the clouds parted. We saw a strange city in the background.

Then Oettinger moved us about an hour ahead in the game, deeper into the city. You meet a lot of characters along the way, like Mr. Speaker as you search for someone who can help you with your mouth and your words. The core mechanic comes through the puppet creature, Baby Moon.

She transfers her power to change gravity. As one player presses the B button, the player transfers gravity to the other player. So one player can walk on a roof upside down without gravity. The other with gravity can walk on the ground. If you are upside down and get the gravity thrown to you, you will fall downward. If you get rid of the gravity and transfer it to your friend, then you could fall and your friend could rise. You keep playing this way in a kind of cooperation. This way, you can get through caverns and gaps and rocky formations together.

“You’re helping each other, touching each other. It leaves that framework pretty clear about how there is no way to progress in this game if you don’t help each other and trust each other,” Oettinger said.

We practiced for a while. You have to move to a certain spot, transfer the Baby Moon creature to the other character, move again as you fall and then catch Baby Moon as it’s returned to you so you can complete the movement and get to safety before you or the other player falls.

Meanwhile, I could see that something dark was going on in the world. It turned out to be quite difficult to get to the city, Oettinger said. Finally, we make our way under the city into the catacombs. We moved further into the game again.

For the past three years, the team of around 40 people has been in fast production. They’re spending most of their time developing mechanics that they want to use to support the story.

“That’s the biggest creative challenge,” Oettinger said. It comes together, so the narrative and the mechanic come together as one coherent thing.”

In a still later section, we meet Mr. Speaker, and he’s in a bad state of doubt and fear. He’s closing down the whole world to prevent it from changing. Kurt and Karla must find a type of primordial clay so they can restore their mouths. You return to the city, and it is empty and the citizens are gone. You come across a golem who wants to cross a column. You give him a nudge, and he falls and catches himself. Then he becomes a bridge you can walk across. And he sees he has found his purpose.

Oettinger said he loved the games from HazeLight because it game them so much encouragement to keep making a co-op game. When those HazeLight games succeeded, it opened doors for Out of Words.

I asked Oettinger how he connected with Epic Games. He said the team got into the Day of the Devs show and the Epic folks saw them there. They agreed to fully fund the game and give the devs total creative freedom.

“It’s the dream. It’s my first game, and I’m spoiled to work with them. They give us the opportunity to bring something really special,” Oettinger said. “The dream came from my childhood. I really loved three things, like puppet making, stop motion animation and games.

“If I found this kind of game when I was a child at 11, it would have meant the world to me,” he said. “I love co-op games. If I could show this game to my mother back then, and she would see why I love games and something that can be played with friends and has a heartwarming and positive tale, that would be something really I would like to bring to the world.”