Now that I have a four-year-old, I'm working on making her completely out of touch with her generation by working through A24's Hey Kids, Watch This. That brought us to Wes Anderson's 2009 Fantastic Mr. Fox, a delightfully detailed stop-motion film. Wouldn't it be cool to play a game like that?
After our talk today, Jakob Kudsk Steensen recommended I take a look at Out of Words from another Danish outfit, Wiredfly Studios. One of the best parts of designing games with real-world materials is that the behind-the-scenes process becomes a part of the game's story—a feature we find in so many other media but rarely in games.
Forty-five mouth shapes, ball-jointed feet, and a hand-sewn leather jacket
Watching the Wiredfly fabrication videos, I'm struck by how seriously the team treats the materiality of their puppets. Senior fabricator Sofie walks through the construction of Prince, a companion character to the silent protagonists Kurt and Karla. His face alone has 45 unique mouth shapes hand-sculpted, 3D-scanned, refined in ZBrush, then printed and painted by hand. His feet are ball-jointed, encased in milliput epoxy, and carved with a wood-like cut texture so he reads less like a human and more like a thing someone whittled. His leather jacket has hand-sewn decorative seams aligned around hidden rigging holes, because the rigging must disappear from the camera but remain accessible to the animator.
Kristina, who handles Kurt's hands, shows the molding process: psycho paint mixed with pigment, silicone poured in a thin line to eliminate bubbles, an armature that can't touch the edges or you start over. Twenty-five minutes from mix to mold. Then a day of waiting to see if you did it right. Then dust applied to kill the silicone shine. Then trimming. Then a final wash. All of this for a hand that, in the game, will be touched by animators "for hours upon hours."
Art director Mikkel describes Prince as that older-brother-of-a-friend type—the guy who thinks he's cool, which is the actual source of his coolness. They tried hats, boots, glasses, hair. None of it worked until they realized coolness was a posture, not a costume. He drives a self-built motorcycle that runs on paint and ink. He's full of himself in a kingdom he doesn't have. He overstays his welcome.
What makes Out of Words feel different from the cozy, hand-crafted aesthetic games we've seen is that the craft isn't an aesthetic at all—it's the production reality. You're not playing in a game that looks like stop-motion. You're playing in stop-motion. And the studio is publishing the fabrication videos as part of the world, the same way Aardman or LAIKA release their making-ofs. The seam between the game and its making is doing the same intertextual work that environmental storytelling does in other titles: telling you something true about the place you're in.