It may sound trite too say that spending time with a video game left me speechless, but it's an apt description in this case.

Out of Words is the co-creation of a talented team of game developers and a team of artists who have dedicated their lives to the disappearing skills of stop-motion animation. It tells a story of young love and the conflicting emotions that often empower it. And its gameplay isn’t just unusual, but strangely evocative, imbuing the already touching tale with metaphorical action that breathes even more impact into a co-op game that's already visually and narratively meaningful.

I’m not alone in my deep reaction to the game. Journalists at Summer Game Fest's in-person Play Days event all seemed blown away by Out of Words. Even famed auteur game director Hideo Kojima loved what he saw, taking to the site formerly known as Twitter to write that Out of Words is "simple, gentle, and beautiful."

“It’s the kind of game we need in an age where we’ve lost the true meaning of ‘words’ on social media,” he wrote.

Out of Words is the brainchild of director, cinematographer, and game director Johan Oettinger, who describes it as a co-op, handcrafted love story. And how does someone who never made a game before come to the decision to make this? It's an interesting story.

“I’ve been making stop-motion films since I was 11-years-old, really, and in my studio we make everything stop-motion.”

Over the years, Oettinger has made a number of shorts with names like Seven Minutes in the Warsaw Ghetto, Ragnarok, and The Lizard, the Flower, and the Doll Head. All of them are stop-motion, and each was financed through public funding and commercials.

“This is my very first game,” he said. “Out of Words is my childhood dream project. I always loved games. I grew up with games. When I played [the 1996 point-and-click stop-motion game] The Neverhood as a boy, I wanted to make a stop-motion game, to pair my two loves.”

To realize that dream, Oettinger partnered up with Kong Orange—a developer known for unusual projects—and the two teams came together as one studio to bring the idea to life. Out of Words' cutscenes are clearly all made with stop-motion, while the gameplay takes the models created by Oettinger and his team, digitizes them, and brings them to life.

“Everything in the game was handcrafted, even the grass,” he said. “The grass is cut out of paper and placed in Unreal Engine. The surfaces are paper books, cut up. The surface of the water is a gelatine texture that we scan. We scan everything in different ways—light scan or photogrammetry scan—to bring it in and create a world of building blocks we make by hand.”

This also applies to the two main characters, Karla and Curt. Both are detailed maquettes. In a cutscene presented in the hands-on demo at Summer Game Fest, we see the two fall into this world only to discover they no longer have mouths.

Oettinger calls the moment the “Alice in Wonderland fall.”

“This is after the first little chapter where you get to know the two characters a little bit as the best of friends, friends who can tell each other everything,” he said. “They find themselves at this moment, at the end of this little sequence of gameplay, in this moment where they have the opportunity to say something new.

“It’s a love story, and they are out of words. They can’t find the right words to say, and in that split second, they lose all confidence, and they are thrust into the world of Out of Words.” When they arrive in Vokabulantis, their mouths disappear, and they are left wondering where they are. 

Initially, Out of Words plays quite simple. Oettinger and I pick from the two characters, and then start to make our way across the unusual terrain. There aren’t really any mechanics initially besides some basic platforming. We run across dunes bristling with grass as a crane flies overhead. We walk through puddles of water and past massive birds. At one point, we borrow a giant ball being pushed by a dung beetle to get to a rotting log. As we walk, Oettinger explains that he really loves coming-of-age stories.

“This is a very personal story,” he said. “I think we all have this memory of failing to say what we want to when we love at that particular moment.” The story is in part driven by Oettinger’s own experiences of first love and broken hearts when he was around 13 to 15 years old, he said.

Next, we skip about an hour deeper into Out of Words. Oettinger says by this point you'll discover you're in a fantasy world—and that it’s much bigger than you expected. The story has opened up a bit, and we’ve met some new characters in this strange world. Moon is a powerful little girl who crashed down from the sky. Prince of Many Colors is very flamboyant, and growing into his prestige. Most important though is Aleph, a light-blue creature that looks a bit like a flying feathered stingray. Aleph is the manifestation of Karla and Curt’s relationship and friendship.

The jump in the demo is to get us to one of Out of Words' first core mechanics, opening up the moment-to-moment play as well as the game's deeper themes. This first mechanic has the players using Aleph to flip gravity. Whoever possesses Aleph has their gravity reversed. Pressing the B button throws the creature to the other player, dropping you from the ceiling just as your friend flies up to replace you. 

To get through this section of Out of Words, Oettinger and I have to perfect the timing of these gravity flips—but we also have to trust one another. I have to know that when I jump into a crevice, Oettinger has my back and will toss Aleph to me, knowing that he will then start to fall and hoping that I'll send Aleph back to him in time.

Each toss sounds a bit like a splash of water because Aleph is a water creature. It’s a clever gameplay mechanic, but also a meaningful metaphor for the relationship between the two characters. It also explains why Oettinger might have wanted to make this a cooperative game.

“I wanted to make something that is based on togetherness, that you can play together,” he said. “And I wanted to feel connected to these two characters and make them equal. Co-op seems like such an obvious choice, to sit together and catch each other, help each other. It's not about points. It's not about being best. It's about working together.”

The concepts of play were driven by both teams, though in the case of this particular mechanic, it started with an idea from one of the designers.

“It just grew from there,” said Esben Kjær Ravn, Executive Producer for Out of Words. “It got molded into the story in several ways. In the day-to-day, we consider this one big team where I’m the producer, Johan is the director, and Jeff (Sparks) is the game designer. It was never a back-and-forth like 'No, you can’t do this' or 'You can’t do that.' It’s much more of a 'Yes' scenario. It’s a very creative team, and we do everything in the same studio, from the design to the visuals to the fabrication to the code, everything.”

The teams actually came together because Ravn and Oettinger clicked so immediately.

“I wanted to make something really special,” Oettinger said. “Something that if I found it, it would change my life. It would show me things that I couldn’t imagine or see anywhere else. I see games as a very, very important artform that can be a really deep emotional, intellectual, and fun experience that really resonates.”

Striving for that goal with Out of Words meant ensuring the story and mood of the game is all connected, Oettinger said.

“To get that is really hard in a game like this,” he said. “You are iterating and making it a very free and creative process before you get it to a very dense and highly beautiful place. It needs to be very free. We do a lot of level design before we start set dressing, so the level design is really, for me, where the script is written.”

In the end, the studio designed about 100 gameplay mechanics, and then chose about 10% or so to keep. The ones that were chosen operate as a sort of metaphor for wherever they're used in the story, and each chapter is meant to reflect where the two friends currently are as characters.

In the Summer Game Fest demo, we find ourselves creeping through dark, narrow tunnels and past odd claymation-like figures who talk among themselves, saying funny little things. Then we find ourselves in a marketplace of sorts, lined with walls of bookshelves and other oddities. The artistry at work here is just astonishing. In one little diorama, a character sharpens a blade, sparks flying across the room. Later we’re in an area that has sections blocked off by massive piles of books.

I have to stop to ask Oettinger how the team created the diminutive books in the game.

“We tried to make a modular system,” he said. “I don’t know how many books they scanned. But they fabricated little miniature books, and we scanned maybe five of them, and then it’s all modular. But everything you see here is handcrafted and scanned in different ways.”

Next, we jump several more hours ahead to a point in Out of Words where you’re supposed to meet Mr. Speaker, who will help you get your mouths back so you can travel home.

“But it turns out he’s not in his right mind and he’s oppressing the whole world and you want to fight him back,” Oettinger said. “So you travel down to this mythical lake under the city, deep, deep down to get this primordial clay there. You manage against all odds to get the clay, but it doesn’t turn into the divine creature that you thought it would.”

This section opens with you and your friend ensconced in a sort of golem, a giant hunk of clay that moves about by extending its arms and hands to grab things and drag itself forward. Each player controls one hand.

“Clay has a lot of symbolism in literature," said Oettinger. "Gilgamesh, the first book, was written on clay. So you could say civilization was built on clay.”

As he’s talking, I suddenly realize that we’re not watching a cutscene. Instead, he’s been doing all of the work, moving the golem toward our goal. We’re slamming through the level in search of one of Mr. Speaker’s servants who can explain to us what’s going on. 

Coming upon the servant—who’s singing "I love my job" over and over again and then screams and runs when you come crashing through a wall—is one of several laugh-out-loud moments in our Out of Words demo.

When we finally catch up to the servant, the camera zooms in on him as he talks, and then pulls back to show a behind-the-scenes view of how he was created and animated. It’s a startling effect that also underscores the pure artistry that has gone into making Out of Words.

I ask Oettinger if there are any plans to add a bit of behind-the-scenes in the game—maybe break the fourth wall once or twice. He said not right now, this ending was crafted specifically for the demo, but perhaps they could add something at the end.

Oettinger got into the medium of stop motion not by way of legendary stop-motion artist Ray Harryhausen, but by seeing A Grand Day Out, the 1989 Wallace and Gromit movie, as a child. 

“I’ve been wanting to do it ever since,” he said. “I’m also a big fan of Harryhausen, and Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

While chatting about the movie greats of stop-motion, I can’t help but wonder if Out of Words or its characters could be destined for other media as well. After all, they still have all of the physical creations used to make the game—and so much more that wasn’t used. According to Oettinger, for instance, levels started kilometers and kilometers long and then were cut down to the best bits.

“Oh, yeah, we would love to expand,” said Oettinger. “We created a whole world—I mean, everything. We created a whole world of things. And we love to explore all kinds of mediums. But right now we're really focusing on Out of Words. It’s a big, big creative endeavor, and we’re focusing on finishing it.”

As the demo wraps up, I ask Oettinger if there is anything else he wants people to know about the game.

“One thing that is important for me is that Out of Words is a really positive story,” he said. “It's about love and working together. I want to bring something interesting to the world. Something that, if I found it, it would be very, very special to me.”

Out of Words is coming soon to the Epic Games Store.