How co-op platformer Out of Words uses original poetry and visual art, like Morten Søndergaard’s Valentine’s Day poem, to transform written verse into interactive storytelling instead of simple flavor text.
Out of Words is not content to be described as “story-rich” or “narrative driven.” The upcoming co-op platformer from Kong Orange and WiredFly, developed with poet and “game poet” Morten Søndergaard and published by Epic Games Publishing, is angling for something rarer: a fully literary game where poetry is both script and system.
That ambition is front and center in its Valentine’s Day celebration. Rather than pushing a seasonal cosmetic or limited-time challenge, the team released an original Valentine’s Day poem by Søndergaard alongside new key art. It reads less like marketing copy and more like bonus lore for a universe built out of metaphors about love, loss and the fear of speaking up.
The poem riffs on the same ideas that define the game’s premise. Out of Words follows Kurt and Karla, two characters who have literally lost their voices and must journey together to reclaim them. It is a cooperative platformer about timing jumps and solving traversal puzzles, but it is also about how people find language for their feelings when that language feels broken or missing. The Valentine’s poem leans into this tension between intimacy and silence, using images of distance, echoes and heartbeat-like rhythms that mirror the on-screen action.
What makes Out of Words stand out in the current co-op space is how tightly that poetic voice is woven into the rest of its design. According to early previews and store descriptions, levels are arranged like pages in a storybook, with handcrafted, colorful environments that feel more like illustrations in a children’s book than typical game backdrops. That choice matters, because it frames each scene not only as a place to clear, but as a stanza in a larger poem about communication.
In many narrative-heavy games, poetry shows up as a collectible, a codex entry, or a bit of scroll text that exists slightly off to the side of the main experience. Out of Words pushes in the opposite direction. The writing is treated as a structural element of the world. Kurt and Karla’s challenges are organized around metaphors: bridges of fragile letters, crumbling walkways that resemble sentences coming apart, and environmental details that make the landscape feel like it was assembled from fragments of a book.
The Valentine’s poem works as a kind of Rosetta stone for this approach. It takes the core themes of the game love, vulnerability, reliance on another person to help you reach places you cannot get to alone and condenses them into a single, self-contained work of verse. When the developers place that poem side by side with new visual art, they are emphasizing how text and image in Out of Words are meant to be read together. You are not just looking at concept art; you are seeing how Søndergaard’s metaphors are translated into silhouettes, color palettes and level layouts.
The cooperative mechanics are especially important to the idea of Out of Words as a literary game. The design follows in the footsteps of titles like It Takes Two and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons in requiring two players to communicate constantly. However, where those games use their mechanics to tell cinematic stories, Out of Words seems more interested in dramatizing the struggle to articulate feelings. Kurt and Karla do not speak in lengthy cutscenes. Instead, their “dialogue” is carried by how players help one another. Passing a jump, timing a lever pull, or catching a falling partner becomes a kind of shared line of poetry.
That is where Søndergaard’s background as a poet and “game poet” shows most clearly. Rather than writing long speeches, he and the design team treat every action as a verse unit and every level as a carefully paced stanza. The Valentine’s poem, announced as a special piece to mark the holiday, highlights specific emotional beats: the fear of reaching out, the thrill of being caught, the awkwardness of saying things out loud. Those beats correspond to the rhythm of co-op challenges, where hesitation, trust and miscommunication are a constant presence.
Visually, Out of Words leans into a handcrafted, almost tactile aesthetic. Screenshots and promo art show layered paper-like textures, soft light and cozy but slightly surreal architecture. The new Valentine’s visual ties into that style by focusing on intimate, close framing rather than spectacle. Instead of a bombastic action pose, you see a snapshot of connection between characters that looks like it could be an illustration for the poem itself. The art is not just concept work for marketing materials; it is part of the game’s attempt to visualize poetic concepts like “losing your voice” or “finding the right words.”
This is where Out of Words edges into defining a new niche. A lot of games borrow the language of literature, but few commit to it as fully as this. By working with a poet from the conceptual stage, Kong Orange and WiredFly are not just adding verse on top of a platformer. They are designing a platformer whose very logic is literary. Pacing, repetition and contrast are used the way a poet might use line breaks and refrains. Environmental motifs recur like rhymes. Co-op set pieces build toward crescendos that resemble the emotional peaks of a well-structured poem.
The Valentine’s Day campaign is a small but telling example of how the team is trying to build an audience for this kind of work. Rather than asking players to grind an event pass, they invite them to read and reflect. The poem is shareable on its own, but it also deepens the world of Kurt and Karla by clarifying what is really at stake in their search for lost voices. It positions Out of Words as something you might want to talk about in the same breath as a favorite book or film, not only as a clever couch co-op game.
As “literary games” become more visible, the challenge is proving that text can do more than dump lore between action sequences. Out of Words is shaping up as a case study in how to make writing playable. Its cooperation-based platforming turns themes of communication and miscommunication into concrete challenges that two people have to navigate together. Søndergaard’s poem and the accompanying art are early signals of how seriously the team takes that mission.
If Out of Words can sustain this blend of verse, visual design and mechanical storytelling across its full campaign, it could become a touchstone for how future games treat poetry: not as flavor text to be skipped past, but as a living part of the systems that make play meaningful.