Out of Words builds its co-op adventure from handmade stop-motion puppets, not just its cinematics

Out of Words (WiredFly and Kong Orange, published by Epic Games Publishing for Xbox Series X|S, 2027), a two-player co-op platformer built around poet Morten Sondergaard's story and voice actor Samuel Barnett's puppet character the Prince, is animated with practical stop-motion puppets rather than CG for both its cinematics and its handcrafted-look gameplay art. Xbox Wire's making-of feature (Will Fulton, June 2026) quotes director Johan Oettinger describing every visible gameplay element as handmade -- grass built from cut-out paper, water from cellophane -- the same practical-light-driven material-substitution logic stop-motion set builders use for miniature environments generally (see the Wiki's miniature-set page). VICE's earlier interview (Brent Koepp, February 2026) adds process detail from puppet fabricator Sofie Kjaer, who describes four years of character development and choosing the Prince's jacket material for durability under the thousands of animation touches a puppet undergoes, and from animator Danail Kraev, who describes stop-motion performance as frame-by-frame work done 'in a very slow pace' guided by the character's recorded voice. Oettinger notes the project began as a traditional stop-motion film before evolving into a game, after the team prototyped roughly 200 mechanics. Update (2026-09-07): Kjaer also told VICE that after fabrication and shooting, "all physical puppets are scanned, with textures translated through scanning processes into the final game assets" -- the same puppet built and animated for camera becomes, via a second capture step, the interactive object players see and move in the game. Folded into the Wiki as a new concept, puppet-scanning-game-engine-integration.