Fans of the 2D platformer Celeste will be sorrowful to hear that the developers’ next game, Earthblade, has been canceled.
In blog post titled “Final Earthblade Update”, Extreme OK Games announced that the sequel to the award-winning game Celeste has been canceled. In the post, EXOK’s director of research and development, Maddy Thorson, detailed the rationale for this decision and the future of the studio.
Thorson’s post details that at some point last year, a dispute broke out between Thorson, Berry and Earthblade art director Pedro Medeiros over Celeste’s intellectual property rights. Thorson declined to provide details of the dispute beyond saying that a resolution has been reached and Medeiros has parted ways with the team and is currently working on a separate game titled Neverway.
However, this dispute gave Thorson and Berry a chance to see where they were currently with Earthblade, and they discovered that the project was not going as expected. “Noel and I also started to think about what our day-to-day work on the game looked like and we realized that this had been our forte for a long time. Sure, working on one project for so long will certainly become a struggle, but I think there’s a deeper problem.”
Thorson says Celeste’s success “put pressure on us to make something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a big part of why working on it became so grueling.” Thorson also says that the dispute with Medeiros “gave us the clarity that we were wrong and the opportunity to admit defeat.”
As for the future, Thorson says she and Berry are prototyping fresh ideas again and trying to return to a game development process similar to what Celeste and TowerFall created.
Celeste was released in 2018 as a throwback to the 2D pixel platformers of venerable. The game’s outstanding level design, difficulty, music, and everything else earned it a perfect rating in our Celeste review. An Earthblade trailer was released in 2022, showing that it will be a fresh 2D platformer.
Matt Kim is senior features editor at IGN.
