Celeste developer’s next game won’t be out this year

Earthblade, the next project from Celeste developer Extremely OK Games, won’t be out in 2024, but progress is being made.

The studio’s director Maddy Thorson shared a new update and while “this game ain’t coming out in 2024”, progress is not “stagnant” and the team is “still excited to work on it”.

Game designer Kyle Pulver has now joined the development team – Pulver has worked on a number of small projects and was world champion of TowerFall.

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Earthblade – Game Awards Reveal

Pulver has aided the team in making progress by “identifying our vision and the problems preventing the game from living up to it”, wrote Thorson.

Thorson identified herself as a bottleneck in development, in part due to her own gender transition. “Transition involves a lot of change, uncertainty and doubt, and it’s easy to see how that has bled into Earthblade,” she said.

“I recently returned from an overseas trip where I underwent a major transition-related surgery. I’m still recovering both physically and emotionally, but it’s so nice to be back home and at work. This was a huge, destabilising event that loomed over the last year for me. Now that it’s over, I feel such a deep sense of ease, like my mind was a tangle of knots that I can now begin to slowly unpick. And with each knot untied, more clarity takes its place. It feels like the start of a new era.”

Earthblade was first teased in 2021, with a first look provided in December 2022 at The Game Awards.

It will be a “2D explor-action game in a seamless pixel art world”, but with a distinctly more fantastical aesthetic than the critically acclaimed Celeste.

Earlier this year, the Celeste team released an N64-style spin-off to celebrate the game’s sixth anniversary. It’s available to play on itch.io.

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