Extremely OK GamesIt’s been three years since Celeste, the pixel-perfect platformer, first came out. Since then, the people who made it have banded together to create a whole new studio — Extremely OK Games — and have been hard at work on what comes next.
Today, that question finally has an answer: Earthblade, a “2D explor-action game” set in a “seamless pixel art world”, with the entire Celeste team working together to create a worthy follow-up, due in “20XX”.
The reveal on Twitter was not a full trailer, or even an early screenshot, but instead something that EXOK is calling a “vibe reveal”, with some gorgeous keyart, the title, and Lena Raine’s music all setting the tone. Old-school JRPG fans will be extremely
Even that title — “Earthblade” — pointedly evokes Earthbound, and the kind of games that took a lot of inspiration from even older-school choose-your-own-adventure and adventuresome fantasy books.
Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry, Amora B and Pedro Medeiros, and Heidy Motta form the EXOK team, all of whom worked on Celeste, and some of whom also worked on Towerfall. The audio design is being handled by Vancouver-based studio, Power Up Audio, whose work you may know from Cadence of Hyrule, Darkest Dungeon, and Super Meat Boy Forever, while the musical score is all done by Lena Raine, who also did the music for Celeste, and wrote the music for Minecraft’s Nether Update. Quite a list of credits, then!
Although there’s not much more to see or to say about Earthblade until they show off some of the art, we’re quite interested in how the game will develop the ideas and design behind Celeste and Towerfall into something that looks more like a traditional RPG. For now, we’ll just have to hope it comes to Switch… which it probably will, given Celeste’s popularity on the platform.
Is this the follow-up to Celeste you were hoping for, or is it a surprising new direction? Let us know what you think about Earthblade in the comments!
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