Kids

Every few years, a small studio makes something that pushes on the question of what counts as a game. Kids is one of those things, and it knows it.

It comes from Playables, the Swiss studio of illustrator Michael Frei and programmer Mario von Rickenbach. It is their second collaboration after the award-winning Plug & Play, which was a surreal, slightly lewd interactive short about cables, sockets and power. Kids keeps that project’s formal daring and trades its wink for something colder. Swiss broadcaster SRG SSR and the Franco-German network Arte co-produced it, and it was published under the Double Fine Presents label. That backing tells you where it sits in the market. It is public-broadcaster art with an indie publisher’s reach, not a product built around retention metrics.

The premise fits in a sentence. You interact with crowds of identical, faceless figures drawn in stark black-and-white line art, across a series of wordless scenes. You tap, drag, pull and flick them. They tumble into holes, pile onto each other, follow whoever moves first, and sometimes refuse to move at all. There is no text, no score, and no fail state. The only objective is to move with the crowd, and sometimes against it, until the screen is empty.

The work exists in three forms: this interactive version, a short film, and a gallery installation. That matters. Kids was not designed as a game and then made into art, or the other way round. It is one idea released in three formats, and the interactive version is the one where the player is implicated in what happens.

Reception follows that split. On the US iOS App Store it sits at a guarded 3.4 out of 5 from 258 ratings — a score that reads as a mismatch of expectations as much as a judgement of quality. The gap between an art piece and a storefront product is the central tension of this release, and it shapes everything below.

• Physics-driven crowd simulation: Each figure has its own body, and the group behaves as a mass. It has momentum, cohesion, and a clear tendency to follow whoever moves first.
• Direct, verb-based touch interaction: Each scene is built around a single gesture: tap, drag, pull or flick. There are no menus, HUD, or button prompts between the player and the crowd.
• Hand-drawn monochrome animation: Michael Frei’s line work is sparse and fluid, and a little unnerving. It reads like a moving ink drawing, not a rendered scene.
• No text, no score, no failure: Nothing is explained or scored. The work trusts the player to find the one interaction each scene is built around.
• Minimalist sound design: Quiet, textural audio replaces a musical score and gives every pile-up and fall physical weight.
• Multi-format artwork: The same material exists as a short film and an art installation. The interactive version is the one that makes the player complicit.

The Loop Is a Single Gesture

In a conventional game, the loop is the repeatable unit of play: fight, loot, upgrade, repeat. Kids has no loop in that sense. Each scene is its own closed system, built around one verb. Once found, the scene plays out and hands the player to the next.

It sounds thin, and on paper it is. The scenes work because the verb is never quite what the design leads with. Drag one figure toward a hole and the rest follow without hesitation, a whole column dropping into the dark because one went first. Pull on a crowd and it resists as a mass, then gives way all at once. The physics does the storytelling. No cutscene tells you that herd behavior is powerful and slightly terrifying. The gesture does.

That is the real design idea, and it is a good one. Most games about conformity describe it. Kids makes the player cause it. The moment a single nudge sends a whole crowd over an edge, the theme stops being abstract.

Onboarding by Omission

There is no tutorial, and that is deliberate. Kids treats discovery as the content. Each scene opens with a tableau and waits. The player pokes at it until something responds, and the response teaches the rule.

This works most of the time. The scenes are clear enough that a few seconds of fiddling reveals the mechanic, and that moment of discovery is the closest thing Kids has to a reward. But the approach cuts both ways. In a handful of moments, the right interaction is obscure enough to leave a player rubbing the screen without direction. With no text and no hint system, those moments can make the work’s confidence feel more like indifference to the player. They are brief, and they are rare. They are also the moments when a skeptical player gives up.

Theme Without a Lecture

The subject is plain: group behavior, conformity, individuality, and the pull of the masses. Kids never states any of it, which is exactly right. The faceless, identical figures are the whole argument. When everyone looks the same, the only thing that tells them apart is where they stand in the crowd, and the player is the one deciding that.

The recurring objective of clearing the screen until everyone is gone gets darker the longer you think about it. The whole piece consists of moving people into holes, off edges, and out of frame. The work never judges the player for it, and that restraint is what makes it land. It is a quiet, unsettling piece that lingers in a way many forty-hour games do not.

The Length Problem

Here is the obvious objection. A full run takes about 15 to 30 minutes, and there is almost no replay value. There are no branching paths, hidden endings, or a mastery curve. Once each scene’s verb is found, it has been seen.

The brevity is not a flaw in the work. Kids is exactly as long as its idea needs, and padding it would have cheapened it. But it is a real issue for the purchase. If value is judged by hours played, Kids loses that calculation. If it is judged the way a short film or a gallery visit is judged, the math looks very different. The work cannot make that choice for the buyer, and its storefront listing does not really try to.

The art direction is the reason Kids exists. Frei’s black-and-white line art is severe to the point of austerity: white ground, black strokes, and figures reduced to rounded bodies without faces. It shouldn’t be expressive. It is anyway, because the animation carries everything. Figures sag, bunch, topple, and stretch with a softness that makes them feel alive and vulnerable.

The key technical achievement is that the physics and the hand-drawn look never fight each other. Many physics-driven games give away their engine in how objects bounce. Here the simulation sits under the drawing rather than on top of it, so a pile-up of bodies reads as animation, not a ragdoll glitch. Von Rickenbach deserves as much credit for that as Frei does.

The UI is essentially invisible, which is the point. There are no overlays, counters, or prompts. Sound is spare and physical: soft thuds, shuffles, and ambient texture that make the crowd feel heavy without turning into spectacle.

On performance, the minimal visual style keeps the work light on hardware, and crowd scenes like these depend far more on smooth motion than on graphical fidelity. The fluid, painterly motion is the core of the experience. Any hitch in a crowd scene would undercut it, so this is where the work most needs to hold up.

iOS and Android: This is where Kids is most at home. Tapping, dragging, pulling and flicking are touch gestures first, and doing them directly on the figures creates a physical intimacy a cursor can’t match. The player is not pointing at the crowd. The player is touching it. Mobile is also where the reception is roughest. The 3.4-out-of-5 App Store score looks like a mismatch of expectations more than a quality problem: a platform full of conventional games breeds expectations this piece was never designed to meet. Phone screens also shrink Frei’s crowded compositions, so a tablet is the better choice where one is available.

Steam (Windows, macOS, Linux): Mouse input maps cleanly onto the drag-and-flick vocabulary. It offers more precision but loses some of the tactile directness. The bigger desktop screen suits the dense crowd scenes and the line work better. For seeing the art properly, this is the version to get. For feeling the crowd move, touch wins.

Kids is a confident, narrow piece of work. It has one idea: crowds move as one, and a single nudge can send them over an edge. It explores that idea through a few precisely built scenes and then stops. The animation is beautiful, the physics is smart, and making the player the one who drives the herd is more effective than any written statement about conformity would be.

It is also short, abstract, and indifferent to the expectations most players bring to a storefront. Seen as a game, Kids is thin, and its guarded App Store rating reflects buyers who felt that thinness. Seen as an interactive short film, it is one of the more memorable examples of the form. We rate it as a mixed proposition: a memorable piece of interactive art that is hard to recommend to most people, and easy to recommend to the right ones. Know what you are buying. If that sounds appealing, go in with an open evening and no expectations.