The studio behind indie darling Celeste, the Vancouver-based Extremely OK Games, is finally ready to unveil its next game, Earthblade.
While the devs admit their blog post is more of a “vibe reveal” than a full-on announcement, there’s a lot to be excited for here, due in part to the studio’s pedigree. Earthblade is described as a “2D explor-action game in a seamless pixel art world” with music from the inimitable Lena Raine, who in my humble opinion composed one of gaming’s greatest soundtracks for Celeste. You can listen to a snippet of her work on Earthblade below.
“It took us four prototypes to find Earthblade, and it’s now been over three years since Celeste’s initial release,” Extremely OK Games director Maddy Thorson wrote about developing the upcoming game. “[The] prototypes taught us a lot, but ultimately we ventured way too far from our comfort zone for them to realistically ever get finished. It took a while, but we feel like we’ve settled on the right compromise between the two with Earthblade.”
Extremely OK Games is planning to release Earthblade sometime between now and the end of the 21st century. Stay tuned for more.
DISCUSSION
It sounds like the same people from Matt Makes Games but under a new development studio name. Do we know if it is due to a growth in the team? Connected with Maddy’s transition and leaving the name Matt behind? Something else?
For some of these indie devs, the studio name seems to have really good brand recognition . Especially when browsing online stores and looking if the dev has any other games. While they lose that use case for discovery; does marketing “from the team that brought you Celeste” have more power than the studio name?