In some rather sad news to kick off 2025, it looks as if developer Extremely OK Games, LTD. (EXOK), the team behind the acclaimed 2018 platformer Celeste, has cancelled development of its upcoming action RPG Earthblade. In a blog post on the dev’s official website, Maddy Thorson, director of Celeste, wrote that the decision had been made earlier in December of 2024, but that the team wanted to take time to process the choice and not make a gut reaction online. “For us on the inside we’ve had some time to process, grieve, and work toward accepting this, although that process is nonlinear and still ongoing,” Thorson stated.
The post doesn’t go into extreme detail, but it appears that the reason Earthblade was shelved is two-fold. One reason was that Pedro Medeiros, a founding member of EXOK and the art director of Earthblade, had been disputing the IP rights of Celeste. While an agreement was reached, Medeiros ultimately decided to leave the company and that forced both Thorson and Noel Berry, programmer on Celeste, to evaluate the project. The two came to the conclusion that forcing their way through the development of Earthblade would only lead to bigger problems down the line. That decision was informed by the immense pressure both felt after the success of Celeste, which is often cited as one of the most important indie games of the 2010s.
While Earthblade’s cancellation is obviously a sad thing, both Thorson and Berry have decided to move on to smaller projects to refocus their energy for the future. Thorson, specifically, mentions that the team wants to recapture the energy they had when designing both Towerfall and Celeste. For the moment, EXOK doesn’t have any announcements to make, but this is unlikely to be the end of the studio. Thorson even mentions supporting Medeiros’ upcoming new project, Neverway, which looks like a classic RPG title from the SNES-era.
Further reading about Celeste
Celeste developer releases free ‘Celeste 64’ game to celebrate 6th anniversary
With a fond Farewell, Celeste cements itself as one of the greatest platformers of all-time
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
