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  "description": "Wiredfly Studios' Out of Words builds its world from hand-sculpted puppets, silicone hands, and ball-jointed feet—stop-motion craft as game design itself.",
  "path": "/i-watched-a-fabricator-pour-kurts-hand-now-i-want-to-play-it/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-29T00:07:39.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.killscreen.com",
  "tags": [
    "out of touch with her generation",
    "Hey Kids, Watch This",
    "After our talk today",
    "Out of Words",
    "Wiredfly Studios",
    "Wiredfly fabrication videos"
  ],
  "textContent": "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?\n\nAfter 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.\n\n## Forty-five mouth shapes, ball-jointed feet, and a hand-sewn leather jacket\n\nWatching 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.\n\nKristina, 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.\"\n\nArt 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.\n\nWhat 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.",
  "title": "I watched a fabricator pour Kurt's hand—now I want to play it",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-29T00:07:40.109Z"
}