How Out of Words builds a cooperative platformer inside living poems, and where it fits alongside Kentucky Route Zero and Sayonara Wild Hearts in the rise of text‑forward, literary games.
Out of Words announced itself to the world with something most platformers never bother with: a Valentine’s Day poem. Instead of character trailers or combat reels, developer Kong Orange and WiredFly teamed with poet and artist Morten Søndergaard to share a written piece about love, distance, and trying to speak when you have no words left. It is a fitting introduction to a game that wants to be read as much as it is played.
Planned for release later this year via Epic Games Publishing, Out of Words follows Kurt and Karla, two partners who have literally lost their voices. The only way forward is together, navigating a handcrafted world that treats language as something you can climb, push, rearrange, and occasionally fall from. Where most platformers are about mastering physics, here the real challenge is learning how to move through another person’s inner life.
Co op platforming inside a poem
At its core, Out of Words is a cooperative platformer built for both online and couch co op. Two players guide Kurt and Karla through a series of side scrolling levels, working in tandem to clear gaps, trigger switches, and solve environmental puzzles. If one player rushes ahead or mistimes a jump, the other feels it immediately. The design constantly nudges you to talk, adapt, and move in sync.
What sets it apart is how those environments are constructed. The world is not just inspired by poetry; it is made out of it. Letters form fragile bridges. Lines of verse arc into staircases. A stanza might be a building’s façade, its windows and doors punctuated by commas and colons. Platforming here is about reading spaces while you read text, scanning sentences for both meaning and footholds.
Because the art is entirely handcrafted, the impression is less of a traditional levels-and-checkpoints platformer and more of a storybook that you and a partner are physically stepping into. The Valentine’s Day reveal gestures at this approach: image and poem are inseparable, the visual composition echoing the emotional beats of Søndergaard’s words. Expect levels to mirror that same interplay, with layouts that echo the emotional state of Kurt and Karla at any given moment.
Turning language into puzzles
Structurally, Out of Words appears to treat language as a systemic resource. Rather than existing only in dialogue boxes or collectible logs, words are part of the problem space. A dangling clause might be a literal cliffhanger you need to stabilize. A repeated word can become a moving platform pattern. An unfinished sentence might block progress until the two of you figure out how to complete it in the environment.
If this sounds close to experimental word puzzlers, the key difference is tone. Where games like Baba Is You push language toward abstraction and logic, Out of Words applies similar playfulness to feelings. It imagines miscommunication as something you can measure in the length of a jump, or a long held silence as a gap in the level you cannot cross alone.
Co op is crucial here. Because every action is shared, even simple platforming beats become tiny conversations. One player might be tasked with holding a word in place to create a path, while the other scrambles across before it falls. You practice trust, timing, and patience, and that in turn makes the story of two people learning how to speak to each other again feel earned rather than just narrated.
Love, connection, and rediscovery
The Valentine’s Day poem sets the thematic frame: Out of Words is about love that has slipped out of sync, and the vulnerable work of building it back up. Kurt and Karla are not arming for a final boss so much as confronting the quiet failures that accumulate in any long relationship. Losing their voices is a metaphor for emotional drift. The levels have to be walked together because there is no way back alone.
By structuring play around cooperation instead of competition, the game lets you inhabit that process of repair. When you mistime a jump and pull your partner down with you, it is a low stakes version of how real missteps in communication feel. When you both finally line up a tricky sequence and make it across, there is a small but genuine sense of reconnection.
Rediscovery is baked into the premise. Kurt and Karla are not just searching for a missing power or artifact; they are searching for ways of speaking that they thought were gone. The game’s tactile, paper like art style underlines this, giving every scene the feeling of something crafted, fragile, and worth preserving. You are not erasing past mistakes so much as layering new words over old ones, writing a different ending in the margins of the same shared page.
Part of a new wave of literary games
Out of Words arrives in the middle of a quiet but significant trend: games that put text and authored language at the center of their design, not just at the edges. Titles like Kentucky Route Zero and Sayonara Wild Hearts have already shown how powerful that approach can be, even when the genres on top look familiar.
Kentucky Route Zero is, structurally, an adventure game, but what people remember is its writing. Its road trips through haunted Americana feel like moving through a surreal stage play, with each location framed as a vignette you listen to as much as you navigate. Dialogue choices are less about branching outcomes and more about choosing what kind of story you are telling about yourself. It is literary in the sense that reading it is the point.
Sayonara Wild Hearts, meanwhile, uses sparse on screen text and a pounding pop soundtrack to chart the end of a relationship and the slow work of healing. You are technically playing a rhythm action game, but the emotional arc is delivered through lyrical song, visual metaphor, and carefully timed captions. Like a concept album, it is structured around emotional beats rather than mechanical complexity.
Out of Words sits somewhere between these two. It borrows Kentucky Route Zero’s interest in collaboration with other art forms, bringing a working poet into the core of its design, while echoing Sayonara Wild Hearts’ focus on heartbreak, recovery, and the interior life of its protagonist. At the same time, it is more mechanically direct: levels are built to be replayed, mastered, and shared with a friend, ensuring that its literary ambitions never float too far away from its platforming roots.
It is part of a broader movement toward what you could call literary games, projects where written language is not an afterthought but a foundational material. We are seeing more collaborations between studios and novelists, poets, or playwrights, and more experiments with UI and level design that foreground words. Out of Words looks poised to push that one step further by asking what it means to literally build a co op platformer out of poetry.
Why this matters
There will always be room for pure mechanics driven platformers, just as there will always be action movies that care more about spectacle than script. What makes Out of Words exciting is the suggestion that you do not have to choose. You can jump, slide, scramble, and fail forward in the company of a friend while also moving through lines of verse that have something to say about how we love and how we lose each other.
If the finished game fulfills the promise of its Valentine’s Day debut, it could be a touchstone for how studios think about narrative and collaboration. Bringing in a poet to shape not only the text but the very spaces you move through is a bold statement about where games can go as an art form. And for players looking for their next co op adventure, it offers something rare: a story about connection that you cannot experience alone, written line by line by the way you move across the page together.