Extremely OK Games, the studio behind beloved 2018 platformer Celeste, has announced the cancellation of its “2D exploration action” project Earthblade, calling the news a “huge, heartbreaking, and yet relieving failure.”
Extremely OK debuted Earthblade in 2021, sharing some mood-setting trailers and a musical snippet. A full reveal came a year and a half later, offering an early glimpse of a side-scrolling platformer, combining elements of combat and exploration, that would see an “enigmatic son of Fate finally return to Earth.”
At the time, the project was expected to arrive in 2024, but Extremely OK confirmed a delay last March. And while he didn’t commit to a new release window, he moved to ensure that fans’ progress wasn’t “stalled” and that the team was “still excited to work on it.”
Today, however, the studio has announced that Earthblade is no more. In a lengthy post shared on the Extremely OK website, studio head Maddy Thorson discussed some of the factors that led to the project’s cancellation. These include a “disagreement over Celeste’s intellectual property rights” which, as outlined in today’s announcement, saw Thorson and Noel Berry on one side and studio “founding member” Pedro Medeiros on the other.
Thorson says the issue was finally resolved after a “very difficult and heartbreaking process,” but noted that the outcome resulted in Medeiros leaving the Earthblade project after “both parties… agreed in the end that we should go our separate ways.” “.
This, in turn, led the remaining members of Extremely OK to “seriously examine whether fighting to finish Earthblade was the right path forward.” And while the project “had a lot to offer,” according to Thorson, “it was also not as advanced as one might expect after such a lengthy development process.”
“Noel and I also started reflecting on what it felt like to work on the game day to day,” Thorson continued, “and realized that it had been a struggle for a long time. Sure, working on a project for that long surely It’s going to become hard work, but this feels like a deeper problem: Celeste’s success put pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a big part of why working on it has become so exhausting”.
“Peter is not to blame for this,” Thorson stressed. “In fact, the breakup with him has given us the clarity to see that we have lost our way and the opportunity to admit defeat. I am sorry in many ways, but a great feeling is undoubtedly relief.”
Now that Earthblade is officially gone, other members of the team have also “moved on.” However, Thorson and Berry now plan to “take all the (many!) lessons we’ve learned…wipe the slate clean and refocus on smaller-scale projects.” As a result, the duo are “prototyping again and exploring at our own pace, and trying to rediscover game development in a way closer to how we approached it in the early days of Celeste or TowerFall.”
“We’re happy to get back to our roots,” Thorson concluded, “and bring some joy back into our creative process, and see where it takes us.”
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