Developers Extremely OK Games, the creators of the hit indie games Celeste and TowerFall, have revealed their next game: A “2D explor-action game” called Earthblade. So far, the only glimpse we’ve gotten of the new game is a “vibe reveal,” but the developers promise what they have will knock our socks off.
“Vibe reveal” is their word for it, not mine. According to Maddy Thorson, one of Celeste’s creators and founders of Extremely Okay, they revealed the game’s poster and a clip from its soundtrack but didn’t want to reveal anything else about it for the sake of maintaining the mystery. “We didn’t want to reveal much about the game or its story yet, but we think that this well establishes the world and the feeling of being in it… But an air of mystery lends itself particularly well to this project…”
Earthblade is apparently the fourth prototype the team has worked on, as Thorson says they have tried hard to find the happy medium between their usual “comfort zone” and the unknown. “It’s tempting as an artist to push yourself too far into the unknown, into a project that’s not going to get finished given the constraints of your circumstances (budget, time, motivation, appetite for failure). It can also be easy to get stuck in your comfort zone producing lifeless work, particularly when there’s a lot of financial pressure.”
The release date is apparently also part of the mystery, as it’s listed as just “20XX,” meaning it’ll at least be released (literally) sometime this century. Thorson said that they’re hoping to release the game “within 5 short years of Celeste” (Celeste was released in 2018), but acknowledge that they don’t actually know when it’s going to be done. With this pandemic causing delays in AAA game development, let alone the indie world, I wouldn’t want to make any promises either.
Source: Extremely Okay Games
