Extremely OK Games – the studio behind beloved 2018 platformer Celeste – has announced the cancellation of its “2D explor-action” project Earthblade, calling the news a “huge, heartbreaking, and yet relieving failure”.
Extremely OK unveiled Earthblade back in 2021, sharing some mood-setting teaser art and a musical snippet. A full reveal arrived a year and a half later, offering an early glimpse of a side-scrolling platformer – blending elements of combat and exploration – that would see an “enigmatic child of Fate returning at long last to Earth”.
At the time, the project was expected to arrive in 2024, but Extremely OK confirmed a delay last March. And while it didn’t commit to a new release window, it moved to assure fans progress was not “stagnant” and that the team was “still excited to work on it”.
Today, however, the studio has announced Earthblade is no more. In a lengthy post shared on the Extremely OK website, studio director Maddy Thorson went into some of the factors leading to the project’s cancellation. These include a “disagreement about the IP rights of Celeste” which, as painted in today’s announcement, saw Thorson and Noel Berry on one side and studio “founding member” Pedro Medeiros on the other.