Games very wellIt’s been three years since Celeste came out for the first time, the perfect gaming platform for pixels. Since then, the people who did it have teamed up to create a completely new studio – Extremely OK Games – and have been working hard on what’s to come.
Today, this question finally has an answer: Earthblade, a “2D exploratory action game” set in an “artistic world of seamless pixels,” with the entire Celeste team working together to create a worthy follow-up, scheduled for “20XX.”
The revelation on Twitter wasn’t a full trailer, not even an early screenshot, but something EXOK calls “vibration revelation,” with beautiful key art, title, and music by Lena Raine that marked the to. They will be old school JRPG fans extremely happy with the atmosphere, reminiscent of Secret of Mana and the days spent cross-legged at a friend’s house on a rainy Saturday, playing video games until your mom comes looking for you.
Even that title, “Earthblade,” punctually evokes Earthbound and the kind of games that were inspired even by high school fantasy adventure books and school adventures.
Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry, Amora B and Pedro Medeiros, and Heidy Motta form the EXOK team, all of them working at Celeste and some also at Towerfall. The audio design is commissioned by the Vancouver-based studio, Power Up Audio, whose work will feature Cadence of Hyrule, Darkest Dungeon and Super Meat Boy Forever, while the musical score is by Lena Raine , music for Celeste and wrote the music for Nether Update from Minecraft. A whole list of credits, then!
While there’s not much more to see or say about Earthblade until they show some of the art, we’re very interested in how the game will develop the ideas and design behind Celeste and Towerfall into something that looks more like a traditional role-playing game. For now, we’ll just have to wait for Switch to arrive … which it probably will, given Celeste’s popularity on the platform.
Is it the follow-up to Celeste I was expecting or is it an amazing new direction? Let us know what you think of Earthblade in the comments.