The hand-crafted world and stop-motion animation of this co-op platformer looks amazing

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Vokabulantis looks like an old-school animated film.

In these heady days of computer-generated images, effects, and animation, it can be something of a comfort to see some old school techniques still being put to use. Watching the footage from upcoming co-op adventure platformer Vokabulantis feels like being transported back to the days (OK, it really wasn't that long ago) when stop-motion animation was regularly used for films and TV shows.

And Vokabulantis looks fantastic, like a real animated film. That's because the environments are all hand-crafted and the characters, even the ones you control, are all stop-motion animated by hand. It's being developed by Kong Orange, developer of Felix the Reaper, and Danish animation studio Wired Fly Animations.

The game stars Karla and Kurt, who are about to tell each other their feelings for one another when suddenly they find themselves trapped in the world of Vokabulantis, unable to speak (which explains why the character don't have mouths). They'll have to work together to fix whatever has gone wrong in this strange and mysterious world.

"Basically it's a giant adventure set in that one split second where you decide to tell another person that you kind of like them," says game chief Esben Kjær Ravn of Kong Orange. "That you're into them. And maybe hope that they will hold your hand in return."

That's an incredibly sweet sentiment, and I can't overstate how good Vokabulantis looks. We'll have to wait a while to see how it plays. In the meantime, you can see more videos of it being painstakingly crafted at the official website.

Christopher Livingston
Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.