For fans of the 2D platformer Celeste, you’ll be sad to hear that the developers’ next game, Earthblade, has been canceled.
In a blog post titled “Final Earthblade Update,” Extremely OK Games announced that its follow-up to the award-winning game Celeste has been canceled. In the post, EXOK Director of R&D Maddy Thorson detailed the reasoning behind the decision, and what’s next for the studio.
“Lat last month, Noel [Berry, EXOK Computer Programmer] made the difficult decision to cancel Earthblade… We made this decision in December and felt it best to wait until now to announce it.”
Thorson’s post details that at some point last year a dispute arose between Thorson and Berry and Earthblade art director Pedro Medeiros over the IP rights of Celeste. Thorson declined to detail the dispute other than to say that there was a resolution reached and Medeiros parted ways with the team and is now developing a separate game titled Neverway.
However, this dispute gave Thorson and Berry a chance to examine where they were at with Earthblade and discovered that the project was not coming along the way they had hoped. “Noel and I also began to reflect on how the game has felt for us to work on day-to-day and realized that it has been a strongle for a long time. Sure, working on one project for so long is bound to become a slog, but this feels like a deeper problem.”
Thorson says Celeste’s success “applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting.” Thorson also says the dispute with Medeiros “has given us clarity to see that we have lost our way, and the opportunity to admit defeat.”
As for what’s next, Thorson says she and Berry are are prototyping new ideas again and trying to return to a game development process similar to how they made Celeste and TowerFall.
Celeste was released in 2018 as a throwback to the pixel 2D platformers of old. The game’s brilliant level design, difficulty, music, and everything else around it earned it a perfect score in our Celeste review. A trailer for Earthblade was released in 2022 showing that it was going to be a new 2D platformer.
Matt Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.
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