Most games want you to save the world. This stop-motion adventure wants you to hold someone’s hand
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top-motion adventure Out of Words was one of the most striking reveals at this year’s Summer Game Fest. While most games are built from code, Out of Words is made from clay, fabric, and glue: a love story literally crafted by hand that even caught the attention of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima (“The biggest praise we could imagine,” game director Johan Oettinger says.)
Oettinger dreamed of making a stop-motion video game since he was 12, when he first played 90s point-and-click claymation game The Neverhood. After years working across films, commercials and installation art, Out of Words became the project to merge these two lifelong passions.
The process of bringing clay to life is as unusual as the game itself. The 40-strong studio in Aarhus, Denmark developed a pipeline of custom scanners and photogrammetry to bring handcrafted assets into Unreal Engine, paired with stop-motion cutscenes that see animators move puppets 12 to 24 frames per second. “Something magical happens when real materials are formed to represent a character … [it] gives a sincerity that makes the character more real than any other form of storytelling,” Oettinger says.
