As I watch a hungover puppet plunge a grim toilet, my brain tries to make sense of what I’m seeing. It’s not the utter absurdity of a disheveled, post-divorce Elmo-like character trying to jam a day’s worth of dumps down the can that’s got me confused and awestruck; it’s how the sequence is working. “Is this partly CGI? Or is it all real-time?” You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s the former.
Revealed at Summer Game Fest 2025, Sans Strings Studio’s Felt That: Boxing, on the surface, looks like Puppet Punch Out! The comedic, 3D arcade fighter follows Ezra ‘Fuzz-E’ Wright, an unadoptable orphan, as he undergoes a grueling (and downright ridiculous) training routine to become a prizefighter and save his orphanage.
But this is much more than your run-of-the-mill fighter. Behind the curtain, Sans Strings Studio’s work on Felt That: Boxing is inadvertently leading a digital puppeteering revolution – and yes, it’s doing it all in real-time.
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An underdog story
Felt That: Boxing was never meant to be a game. In fact, when the trailer was announced at Summer Game Fest, Sans Strings Studio hadn’t technically started full production on it. The bizarre boxing fighter originally started as a boxing skit for an SNL-style sketch show, called String Theory, that the studio is working on with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios – the company behind Robot Chicken.
The studios teamed up when Towner saw early demos of Sans Strings Studio’s co-founder and real-time digital artist, Ryan Corniel’s, bizarrely brilliant real-time puppetry work on X, and reached out.
“[The experiments] immediately resonated with me,” Towner tells us. “I’ve always loved stop motion animation. Here at the studio, we do a lot of physical puppets and puppetry. So anytime people [can] do what to me is like magic tricks, getting things to feel very handmade and tactile, but using whatever the latest technologies are to do it, I have this visceral reaction.”
String Theory was one of the earliest ideas born out of this collaboration. According to Towner, it was an “easy extension” of what Stoopid Buddy Studios was doing on Robot Chicken. The partnership allowed the studio to continue concocting the off-the-wall creations it’s known for, while leveraging Sans String Studio’s innovative digital puppetry tech to push its boundaries.