Celeste developer starts 2025 with a 'huge, heartbreaking, and yet relieving failure' as creative difficulties and internal conflict lead to the cancellation of Earthblade
Celeste developer Extremely Ok Games has announced the "difficult decision" to cancel its follow-up project Earthblade, citing long term creative difficulties compounded by a conflict within the studio regarding the rights to Celeste.
In a blog post published on the Extremely Ok Games website, studio director Maddy Thorson wrote, "We are opening the year with a huge, heartbreaking and yet relieving failure", as she and programmer Noel Berry " made the difficult decision to cancel Earthblade."
Thorson stated the studio made the decision "late last month," waiting until now to announce the cancellation to give the team "time to process, grieve, and work toward accepting this". She also apologised to anyone who might be "emotionally invested in this project", before explaining the reasons behind ending it.
According to Thorson, the spark that ultimately blew up Earthblade was a "fracture" within the team over the IP rights of Celeste, with Thorson and Berry on one side, and Celeste's art director Pedro Medeiros on the other. Thorson doesn't detail the specifics of the dispute, but states that the conflict "eventually reached a resolution", culminating in Medeiros leaving the company to work on his own project Neverway.
Thorson stresses that Medeiros isn't to blame for Earthblade's cancellation, stating "Pedro and the Neverway team aren't the enemy and anyone who treats them as such isn't welcome in any EXOK community." Rather, his departure caused Thorson and Berry to "take a serious look" at Earthblade's progress. "The project had a lot going for it but, frustratingly, it was also not as far along as one would expect after such a protracted development process," she writes.
Earthblade was first announced back in 2021, already three years on from the release of Celeste. It was a considerably larger and higher profile project than Extremely Ok's affirmatory precision platformer—which has sold 1.7 million copies since launch. Boasting a similar pixel art style, Earthblade introduced combat and an openly explorable world to the 2D platforming, and showcased a snazzy trailer at 2022's Game Awards. The last we heard about it was in March last year, with Thorson saying that it "ain't coming out in 2024."
Thorson explains that the success of Celeste is partly why Earthblade failed, stating it "applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better", which was "a large part of why working on it was so exhausting." As for what's next for the studio, Thorson said Extremely Ok is currently in a prototyping phase, "trying to rediscover game development" in a manner that led to games like Towerfall and Celeste. "We gave it all we got, and life goes on."