When Out of Words was revealed at the Game Awards 2025, the game’s bombastic character Prince quickly became an instant hit with players. The protagonist’s quirky dialogue and witty performance made him a stand out moment in the annual show.In an exclusive interview, we got to talk to Dirk Gently actor Samuel Barnett, who voices the affable Prince. We also spoke to the development team behind Out of Words who open up about the poetic origins of the project, the challenges of designing a co-op experience without traditional dialogue, and the painstaking puppet creation process. Meeting PrinceMaking PrinceThe Freedom of Voice Acting in Out of WordsScreenshot: Epic GamesYou’ve done extensive live action work. How does voice acting for a video game differ from performing on camera or on stage? Did you find certain aspects more challenging or more freeing?Samuel Barnett: Well, in many ways, it’s it’s way more freeing because you don’t have to learn the lines, which is always a joy. And I’m always asked to play characters in games that I would never get to play in real life, like especially some of the more kind of action battle type games that I’ve done, where I personally would never be asked to do that on screen or on stage.So I do find the genre really freeing. But it also comes with the difficulty of you’ve only got your voice to convey lines as the actor, especially, if it’s not motion capture. It can get so subtle in trying to really nail a line.The good thing about Out of Words is that it’s beautifully written. And not all video games are beautifully written, so sometimes you have to kind of work harder. But I really, I really enjoy the process of working with everyone on the game, in terms of being able to kind of bring the script to life. Because when it’s so well written, it speaks to an actor. I think it’s good writing.How Stop-Motion Impacted His Performance as PrinCeScreenshot: Epic GamesDid the game’s puppet designs and stop-motion art style impact your performance?Samuel Barnett: It didn’t really. I had been given an idea of what Prince looked like, but I really just took it from the script. I think we had two or three days of our first sessions to work on it and kind of warm into it.The Prince is a witty, funny part, which I love. I love doing comedy stuff, and so I was able to kind of run with that, which is always just fun. It’s just so nice when there’s a lot of stuff I have done that has just been grunts and shouts in fighting games. Out of Words, in comparison, felt so much more character driven, poetic, lyrical in the way he’s written.Collaboration and ImprovisationHow much of your performance as Prince was improvisation versus sticking strictly to the script?Samuel Barnett: They gave me free reign. They were like, if there’s a line that you think should be said in a different way, go for it. A joy of voice acting is that you can say a line 20 times in 20 different ways, or change words here and there if you need to.And there were certain bits of Prince that needed a bit of improvisation. There’s a section where he’s sort of coming up with the protagonist’s names. And we spent quite a long time in finding out how to do that, and did loads of different versions of that sequence.The developers created such a nice environment for us all to work in. I think in the sessions I had with them, that I felt very free and safe to play. Where I thrive as an actor is in collaboration. I’m never going to be a writer or director, but if you give me a good script, I can run with it, and I can add to it where it’s appropriate. So there was a bit of that with Out of Words.Seeing the Prince Go ViralScreenshot: Epic GamesWhat was it like seeing the audience response to Prince after the Game Awards reveal trailer?Samuel Barnett: It’s amazing. It was the first time I’d seen any of Prince actively animated. First of all, I was so blown away by how beautiful the game looks. And then I was kind of blown away by the voice match, actually.I have been told they adjusted the design of Prince based on what I did. And it was really gratifying for me to kind of see that my voice did seem to match so well with the character’s design. It was really great seeing the fan response.You always hope with any job that you do as an actor that it will gain some traction and that people will like it. But with the best will in the world, you can’t make that happen. People pick up on stuff, or they don’t. And it seems that there’s already a lot of excitement about Out of Words, and there’s already some love for this character, which is great.Who Is the Prince of Colors?Screenshot: Epic GamesHow would you describe Prince without giving too much away? When we first see him in the trailer, he seems like he’s a guide to Kurt and Karla.Samuel Barnett: He is like a sort of elder brother to the game’s main characters Kurt and Karla. I also don’t know his full character development yet, but what I do know about him is he’s being a guide to them. But he’s also quite a lost and vulnerable soul as well. I think in his journey in helping Kurt and Karla, he is also kind of helping himself. I think where we first meet him, he’s sort of flashy and colorful and bright, and kind of shines really bright. But underneath there’s a real vulnerability. I think he’s actually quite lonely and a bit lost himself. Hence, he really tethers himself to those two main characters very quickly. And wants to be liked, wants to be loved. Screenshot: Epic GamesI think he finds his identity through who he’s with. I don’t know how much he’s to be completely trusted, not because he’s a bad person or trying to lead anyone astray. But I don’t think he’s purely altruistic. I just think he’s trying to find himself and is delighted when the two main characters come along. Also, he loves to talk, and really loves the sound of his own voice in a lovely way, in a fun way. So coming across these two characters who have lost their voice is delightful for him, because he just has a three way conversation for them with himself, which he loves.Acting Opposite Silent CharactersWere there challenges performing opposite characters who don’t verbally respond?Samuel Barnett: No, I have to say no. I don’t think I’ve ever done a game where I’m recording with any other actor, so all my lines are always recorded separately. So no matter, even if the other character has loads of dialog, you’re still kind of acting with yourself or acting with reading in for you. But the fact that the two main characters can’t speak sort of made it a lot more fun. They literally cannot communicate with my character. And I do think it’s funny. I don’t know where the story is going to go, but I do think Prince is going to learn from Kurt and Karla about silence, and different forms of communication, really. Prince has got so much to say, and yet, I do think he potentially finds it hard to connect with others. And I also think if Kurt and Karla could speak, I wonder if he’d stick around. How he’d be able to kind of manage that, because I think connection is what he’s yearning for.How prince evolved over timeScreenshot: Epic GamesI know video game development takes a really long time. Did you find the Prince character evolved over the years as you as a person changed?Samuel Barnett: It is a really long process. And I mean, the last one that I did a long time on – I think it was almost two and a half years of voice work – was Cyberpunk 2077. I changed a lot in two and a half years. I did my first session on Out of Words ages ago. This one must have taken even longer because of the stop-motion animation. It is painstaking and absolutely stunning. I mean, these people are artisans, crafts people, like proper artists. I know CGI takes forever as well, but adding in this kind of stop-motion animation is just extraordinary. And what goes into making one single character, the time and attention and, quite frankly, the money. I think this game looks incredibly beautiful, and you can see all that artistry, time and attention to detail that’s been spent on screen. What He Hopes Players Take Away from out of wordsScreenshot: Epic GamesWhat do you hope players take away from Prince as a character?Samuel Barnett: Well, I hope they relate to who he is as a person, and by that I mean his own flaws or difficulties and his struggles too, because he is trying to connect. Prince is trying to better himself and trying to be a good person. I think he wants to be wanted. I think he might sometimes go about it the wrong way. Like running over everybody, so flattening everyone on the way, which is why he loves the fact that the main characters can’t talk back. But I want people to connect to his humanity. That’s what I loved in the script – he’s complex and flawed. He is bright and shining and beautiful and brilliant, and he’s also vulnerable and sensitive and lonely and flawed. And I love that. For me, I love complexity and character and anything that I’ve done over the years that that people have ever responded to. It’s always been because of the humanity that they can see and that resonates with them. So yeah, I just hope people take away this idea of we all need people, and no one is an island, and we need connection. And that’s where I think the Prince comes from.In this second portion of our feature, we sat down for an extensive interview with Out of Words Game Director Johan Oettinger, Puppet Fabricator Sofie Kjær, and stop-motion Animation Director Danail Kraev. The Poetic Origins of Out of WordsScreenshot: Epic GamesOut of Words was developed based on concepts from you and legendary poet Morten Søndergaard. Can you open up about what from his works inspired you to make the game Out of Words?Johan Oettinger: I think all of Morten’s works are really wonderful. Out of Words is based on one idea Morten had. It’s developed with him. It started out as this little poetry film that we then grew when we met each other through this idea, and then we built this whole world around the idea of falling into language.That inspired me so much, because as a dialectic boy I can really relate to that – falling into language. It took me quite a while to fall in love with language, and it specifically took Franz Kafka to open up the madness of language for me. This idea of falling into language is very connected with love.Morten and I are both quite romantic. So of course it became a love story about friendship. Having two main characters falling in love. And I, of course, love stop-motion. It’s one of my biggest loves. I love poetry and language. But right next to stop-motion, I love games. It’s always been my lifelong dream to make a game. So this idea quickly grew so big that it dawned on me: Oh my gosh, this is the game I’ve been dreaming of making.Designing a Co-Op Game Without Traditional DialogueScreenshot: Epic GamesIn the game, Kurt and Karla have lost their voices. Were there design challenges in creating a co-op game that requires communication while centering on protagonists who don’t initially have traditional dialog?Johan Oettinger: Oh yeah, in a narrative sense, for sure. But it is inherently a gift to the whole process, because I’m not good with words in general. The whole concept of seeing words as being human itself, the inner voice, traveling inward to a world and getting to play that together is the core idea.It’s very natural that they lose their language, and it kind of moved out of the game between the two co-op players, either over Discord in online gameplay or on the sofa together. The game design and the heart of everything is put together to make conversation start between the two players. In that way, it’s full of words and dialogue – but between the players and not the characters. Screenshot: Epic GamesDid having those dialog constraints spark any creative mechanics within the game?Johan Oettinger: Very much so. It was a concern of ours, but it ended up being a big gift. A lot of the mechanics we chose after making many prototypes, are about communicating. It’s a game about working together. It’s a game about helping each other. The mechanics are very much a dance between catching each other, and getting in sync. It’s a bodily language.Sometimes that connection is broken through narrative, and they’re split up. And then the mechanics reflect that. We used to call it emotional mechanics. At its core, it really is a symphony of emotion you go through where it’s the sum of its parts.Why Stop-Motion Was the Right Artistic LanguageScreenshot: Epic GamesOut of Words uses stop-motion. Why was it the right artistic language for the story? Why did it resonate with you? Johan Oettinger: I love stop-motion so much. It’s all I think about. Everything we do here is handcrafted. It’s been a dream making a handcrafted game. A childhood dream of making this magic. I think it’s pure magic when surfaces and objects come alive. It becomes very emotional for me when objects move. Because as humans, we are so connected to surfaces and textures. When fabrics and textures in Sofie’s hands become characters, and then Danail brings them to life based on Samuel Barnett’s voice, it becomes pure magic. The magic of video games is that you are actually holding something. Holding a button or holding the controller is a similar magic to stop-motion, as it becomes tactile and interactive.Screenshot: Epic GamesAs someone that games a lot, I think there’s also a hunger from players for physical quality in games because everything’s so digital now. So whenever you see a project like Out of Words, everybody’s blown away by the handcrafted physicality of the actual graphics. Johan Oettinger: I think it’s because we know everything so well, from the touch of our own clothes, to the love our loved ones. The way warmth and cold feels. We are so connected to the world through our senses. We know exactly how we feel, and how it should feel when we see it on screen. When I see something in a game, I know how it would feel to touch that. And if it is real, then it feels real. Everything is real in Out of Words. Every pixel you see is has been touched and made by human hands, and every pixel you see on in the game is a texture that is translated through scanning processes and all that.Inside the Puppet Creation ProcessScreenshot: Epic GamesThe level of detail in Out of Words’ puppets is staggering. I mean, even down to the zippers and fabric textures on individual characters. It’s truly incredible! How long did it take to create each puppet? I know there’s a lot of characters in the game.Sofie Kjær: It really depends on the character design. Every stop-motion puppet comes with its own challenges and personality that needs to be translated into real life. So you need to use a lot of different techniques. Some characters require more work than another one might.We go through a lot of textures and materials to nail that tactile feeling Johan mentioned. We spend a long time experimenting. As you are making the puppets, is it an ongoing process that you create throughout the entire development of the game? Are you making changes to characters as the story goes on?Screenshot: Epic GamesSofie Kjær: For Out of Words, we’ve been developing characters for the last four years. We kind of finish one set of characters and then immediately send them off to animation. We then start a new cast of characters and then wait to see how they come to life later in animation. It’s really amazing and special. Johan Oettinger: There’s ongoing fixes to the puppets as we develop the game. The more screen time and acting a character has, the more complicated they become. For example, The Prince took months because he needed to withstand thousands of touches from Danail during animation. His jacket material was specifically chosen for durability.For Prince, we went back and forth between story, character development, and fabrication. We refined him until we all felt he truly worked.How The Prince Became A Vital Character to Out of WordsScreenshot: Epic GamesSofie Kjær: But actually for Prince, we kind of went back and forth a lot between story and character development and the actual fabrication of the character itself. He’s quite unique in that way, where most of the other principal characters, we kind of had them designed, and then we started building them. But with The Prince, we had a rough idea. We started building him, and then we kept working that rough idea until we really found a character that we all loved and felt like worked well for the story. This meant that we sometimes had to take a couple of steps back, and then we could continue working on this character, and we really feel like we finally got him to be something amazing that we all love.Screenshot: Epic GamesJohan Oettinger: The character, the Prince, is even meaningful to the project in a meta level. When you’re working with a project of a certain ambition or length in production, it starts having its own its own opinions, and it starts having its own life. And that’s really come through this character of the Prince, because just like Sofie says, the creation process of him was really twirly. When voice actor Samuel Barnett came in and started acting him, it started to change the story. And we then went in and rewrote the character a bit to fit Samuel’s voice. But then when Danail started to animate him and it further impacted his voice. I think this can only really happen in game making. Because that’s such an iterative and process.From Film to Interactive Stop-MotionScreenshot: Epic GamesDanail, you’ve worked in film before. How does stop motion differ in a video game, where you know players are going to be controlling the character? Danail Kraev: Game animation has its specifics, especially interactive parts. But my job is to really bring the characters to life, especially in the cinematic cut scenes, where we will get to know more of the characters, and we really see them close up and with all their expressions and emotions. So that’s very close to to film. And when you have a strong character design and such a lovely voice as Samuel Barnett’s, we kind of just bring it to life in a in a very unique way. The stop-motion almost becomes like a meditative trance. You go frame by frame, and start performing in a in a very slow pace. The voice starts leading you and the character design and something within you just comes together as a whole at the end. So it’s similar to to film, but of course, it’s just one part of the game.What the Team Hopes Players Take Away from out of wordsScreenshot: Epic GamesOut of Words feels like a metaphor for relationships and having deeper communication with someone else. What do hope players kind of take away from the game?Johan Oettinger: I played games with my siblings a lot. I’m a middle child, and I played games with my little sister, and I played a lot with my my big brother. But never the three of us. So for me, games is really very connected to that those memories of experiencing my relationship with them. Some of the strongest memories I have of art is through games. And so Out of Words is really very connected to that, and also connected to the urge of just being understood. It’s about the game’s two main characters understanding each other through this journey. Out of Words also captures how I feel most of the time. I feel like, please understand me. Please, please know that I love you. And the game is very much about that. And of course, it’s a story, and it’s an adventure in that way. But having two players play this game together and have a meaningful conversation while you’re playing within the work itself, I think, is, as an art form is unique. You cannot get that in any other art form like that.The Hideo Kojima MomentScreenshot: X @HIDEO_KOJIMA_ENAt Summer Game Fest, Hideo Kojima publicly praised Out of Words, calling it the kind of game “we need in an age where we’ve lost the true meaning of ‘words’ on social media.” What did it mean to you to hear that from someone as prolific as Kojima?Johan Oettinger: He came into our little booth at Summer Game Fest. Just sitting in my own little world with Hideo Kojima, playing the game we’re trying to make and just seeing him resonate and talking with him about art was such an incredible experience. And then he goes out and and tweets about it or talks about it afterwards was incredible.Because Kojima really got it in that moment. He really understood what we were trying to make. It was quite special. He just really got it, and was able to express everything in a short sentence. He’s so precise. And Kojima didn’t need to do that. He is right, Out of Words is about being human and communicating and bringing people together and and traveling through this story of friendship. A Symphony of EmotionScreenshot: Epic GamesWhat can players expect from the kind of the levels that they’ll explore in Out of Words?Johan Oettinger: I really wholeheartedly like things that are a sum of its parts thing. Out of Words is a journey that takes this very seriously and in a playful way. It is an experience through all senses, meaning that each chapter and each little segment of story and character and gameplay is particularly designed to evoke a specific mood or get you through a specific beat. So the gameplay itself, the mechanics you go through, are orchestrated in a way to tell the story through the interactivity. So you run together, dance together, play music together, you slide together, you get lost together, and you flee. And it is a whole journey in kind of an arc between these two characters.Screenshot: Epic GamesThe way you describe Out of Words’ story campaign almost sounds like an orchestra of layered components.It is kind of is, yeah. In the end, it’s all like a symphony of emotion, in a way. And I don’t mean that you necessarily have to sit and cry sometimes (I think you will), but it is really a symphony that has highs and lows. And I mean that very seriously, that it is highs and lows. It has to be. A game has to be fun. But what visuals and music can do is get you into a real low emotionally. If you take out any part of it, it all falls apart. It is all supported with each other. And the characters are there for a very, very specific reason. And each puzzle or mechanical level design is there to get you into a specific mood, or get to get you in a certain state of mind, so it’s all there in a very orchestrated reason.What to Expect from Out of WordsWhat gameplay feature or aspect of Out of Words are you most excited for players to experience?Johan Oettinger: I think its players losing themselves in each other and letting go of being the best. I have kids, so you can really see when my son has a friend that is very, very close. They will have a competition, and they’re very, very competitive sometimes. But it actually doesn’t really matter who wins. When you’re really close with someone, and then lose yourself in the relationship, it’s not about points or being best. It’s about doing it together and and helping each other. It’s about enjoying a world together in characters and taking it all in. That’s what I want you to feel after playing Out of Words.Out of Words is set to release in 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC. It can be wishlisted on the Epic Games Store now.The post Out of Words Interview: How Stop-Motion and Samuel Barnett’s Prince Created One of 2026’s Most Emotional Co-Op Games appeared first on VICE.