Out of Words was the most visually spectacular game at Summer Game Fest

One of the reasons I’ve been covering video games for nearly two decades is because I still love that thrill of discovering something unexpected.

Every now and then I’ll be presented with a game that completely takes me by surprise, and goes from something I previously had zero knowledge of, to an immediate entry near the top of my wishlist.

At this year’s Summer Game Fest, that game was Out of Words.

Created by the Danish pairing of game developer Kong Orange and stop-motion animation studio WiredFly, Out of Words is a co-op platformer where everything you see on the screen was made entirely by hand.

If you aren’t familiar with it yet, don’t worry – most people hadn’t been until this month. The game was initially launched as a Kickstarter back in 2021 under the name Vokabulantis, where around 2,000 backers helped it to pass its modest €70,000 goal. Development has been continuing since then, but earlier this month project lead Kristoffer Rasmussen told backers it had been picked up by a publisher.

Keeping the details private for a little longer, Rasmussen said this publisher “truly understands our vision and gives us full creative reign, and is providing the tools, reach, and production strength to take everything you backed into its final form, without compromise”.

The following day, at Summer Game Fest’s main showcase, Vokalbulantis was revealed to a brand new global audience under its new name Out of Words, where it was also announced that Epic Games Publishing would be handling its release on the Epic Game Store, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

24 hours later, in a small room at the Summer Game Fest Play Days campus, I was sitting on a couch, playing Out of Words, utterly slack-jawed at what I was looking at.

“24 hours later, in a small room at the Summer Game Fest Play Days campus, I was sitting on a couch, playing Out of Words, utterly slack-jawed at what I was looking at.”

The game tells the story of Kurt and Karla, two best pals who are entering that period in adolescence where boy and girl friends can potentially become boyfriend and girlfriend. They both have feelings for each other, but just as they’re about to share those feelings they realise they can’t find the words – quite literally, in this case, because their mouths have disappeared.

As if that wasn’t awkward enough, the ground then collapses and the would-be couple find themselves in the realm of Vokabulantis, where it soon emerges the fate of the world is at stake. It’s up to the newly mute Kurt and Karla to make their way through Vokabulantis, from its dark catacombs to its city Nounberg, as they try to save the world while falling in love in the process.

Given that it’s a co-op adventure, my time with Out of Words was spent playing alongside game director Johan Oettinger. As we played, he pointed out that every element on the screen had been made by hand in real life.

During a beautiful countryside scene, he noted that all the grass had been made of torn-up pieces of paper, while the rocky platforms we were clambering on top of were all in fact pages from books, stacked up and arranged into rock-like shapes.

It’s Kurt, Karla and the game’s supporting cast which are the real stars of the show, however, and while the pair of protagonists may not be able to speak the rest of the characters they encounter on their adventure certainly have no issue finding their voices. They’re a talkative bunch, but thankfully a lot of the dialogue I encountered during my demo was genuinely funny, lending even further to the game’s utterly endearing nature.

So far it’s the gameplay itself that’s perhaps the least revolutionary element of Out of Words, but that’s not to say it’s bad by any means. Oettinger told me that each of the game’s stages focuses on a different mechanic, a move that reminded me of another fantastic co-op title, It Takes Two.

This meant in one section we were using a gravity-swapping mechanic to flip Kurt and Karla between the floor and the ceiling, leading to some interesting leap-of-faith puzzles where players dive into pits, in the hope that their partner will flip the gravity at just the right minute and pull them back to land safely.

In another section, later in the game, we were controlling a gruesome blob-like creature – think of an uglier version of the Pokémon Geodude – with each player controlling one of its arms. Working together, we had to grab and pull ourselves along the stage, climbing and swinging around its maze of walls and platforms, as we pursued a fleeing character.

Again, none of these gameplay mechanics were particularly groundbreaking, but nor are they in any way a hindrance, and they serve as a perfectly enjoyable way to progress through the game’s stunning environments and entertaining dialogue.

While we played through the game and I laughed away at the various hijinks of the NPCs, I told Oettinger that I had been looking for a new game to play with my daughter, and that I was now really looking forward to No More Words because it feels like the sort of thing she would absolutely love.

He replied that this was the best possible feedback that he could have received, because while the game is obviously aimed at any types of co-op partnerships, it was especially important to him that it added to the woefully low number of high-profile, well-reviewed family-friendly co-op games there are out there.

It’s clear that one of these games, the aforementioned It Takes Two, has been something of an influence. While No More Words has been in development since before It Takes Two came out – the Kickstarter launched nine days before It Takes Two’s release – the news that the game will feature not only cross-platform online multiplayer but also a Friend Pass system (where your online partner doesn’t have to own the game) comes straight from Hazelight‘s wheelhouse.

It’s certainly not a bad thing to be compared to, especially because it only takes a cursory glance to realise that No More Words isn’t a clone and absolutely goes in its own direction, its incredible art direction being the most obvious example of this.

If the rest of the game looks like this and continues to support its jaw-dropping look with solid gameplay, however, there’s a real possibility that the parallels with It Takes Two could extend beyond the general idea, and could go as far as a similar run of Game of the Year awards.