Image: Extremely OK Games
It’s game over for the Celeste follow-up game.
Extremely OK Games, the developer behind the critically-acclaimed 2018 platforming game Celeste, has cancelled its next game following four years of development. The studio first unveiled its next “2D explor-action” game Earthblade in 2021, before releasing its first trailer in 2022. This year however, the developer announced that the project had been axed, saying that it was a “huge, heartbreaking, and yet relieving failure.”
Here’s a trailer for the game that will never be:
Celeste developer cancels next game and starts over
Extremely OK Games released Celeste in 2018 as a studio called Maddy Makes Games, before it was shut down and reformed as Extremely OK Games in 2019. It’s safe to say that the game was a success; critics praised its narrative and slick platformer gameplay, accentuated by its stylish 2D pixel art visuals and lush soundtrack. It was nominated for a number of awards upon its release, including Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2018 (which it ended up losing to God of War).
The studio planned to follow up this success with a 2D side-scrolling platformer game called Earthblade, which was unveiled back in 2021. The game was set to follow an “enigmatic child of Fate returning at long last to Earth,” with a tentative release date of 2024. The studio eventually delayed the game in March 2024, telling fans that it was “still excited to work on it.”
This week however, Extremely OK Games announced that the game was axed in December 2024. A website post written by the studio’s director of R&D (and Celeste game director) Maddy Thorson explained that multiple factors led to the game’s cancellation, including a "disagreement about the IP rights of Celeste.”
This disagreement saw Thorson and computer programmer Noel Berry in conflict with founding member Pedro Medeiros, leading to both parties parting ways. Thorson did not provide explicit details of the conflict, but stated that it was a “very difficult and heartbreaking process.”
The studio then decided to “take a serious look at whether fighting through to finish Earthblade was the right path forward,” with Thorson admitting that it had “a lot going for it,” but it was “not as far along as one would expect after such a protracted development process."
Thorson said that development on the game “has been a struggle 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. 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."
As for what’s next, Thorson noted that “other members of the team have moved on” during Earthblade’s troubled development, and the studio as a whole is set to “take all of the (many!) lessons we've learned from Earthblade, wipe the slate clean, and refocus ourselves back to smaller-scale projects.”
Thorson confirmed that the studio is “prototyping again” and “trying to rediscover game development” much like how it originally approached making games like Celeste. In closing, Thorson reflected that “scaling the core team up post-Celeste has ultimately been a failure, and that's okay. We gave it all we've got, and life goes on. We are happy to return to our roots and reclaim some joy in our creative process, and see where that takes us.”
And there you have it: Earthblade is no more, and it will be some time before we see Extremely OK Games release its next video game.
