Celeste developer cancels its "explor-action game" Earthblade following a delay last year
Extremely OK Games, the developer of 2018's hit indie platformer Celeste, has announced the cancellation of its next game, Earthblade, due to development and IP ownership issues.
The details:
The studio announced Earthblade in 2021, describing it as a "2D explor-action game," with gameplay of the 2D side-scroller debuting at the end of 2022. Earthblade would have told the story of an "enigmatic child of Fate returning at long last to Earth" and included traditional platformer combat and exploration in a retro visual style similar to Celeste's.
However, after the game was pushed back to March 2024, Extremely OK has now confirmed that the project has been canceled due to internal development issues and disagreements over ownership of the Celeste IP. “Earlier this year, a fracture began forming in the team,” R&D director Maddy Thorson said in a statement. “Specifically, this was between us (Noel & I) and Pedro, a founding member of EXOK, longtime friend & collaborator, and art director of Earthblade, and pixel/ui artist on Celeste and TowerFall. The conflict centered around a disagreement about the IP rights of Celeste, which we won’t be detailing publicly – this was obviously a very difficult and heartbreaking process. We eventually reached a resolution, but both parties also agreed in the end that we should go our separate ways.”
Thorson clarified that losing the project's art director was not the only factor contributing to the cancellation, stating that despite the setback, the game was still not far enough along in development to reflect the time spent working on it. However, she added that she believes the Earthblade would have been a "great game" if it had been completed.
Extremely OK will now concentrate on smaller projects, with the company in the prototyping stage, "trying to rediscover game development in a manner closer to how we approached it at Celeste's or TowerFall's inception." Meanwhile, Pedro Medeiros, a former art director, is working on a new project titled Neverway at Coldblood Inc.
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