Extremely OK Games, the indie team behind TowerFall and Celeste, announced pixel art sidescrolling action platformer Earthblade in 2021, before announcing the following year that the game would be releasing sometime in 2024. Now, in a recently published update, the studio’s founder, Maddy Thorson, has announced that the game won’t be coming out this year. A new release window hasn’t been shared.
“We appreciate your patience as we try our best to make this video game that appears to be stubbornly determined to not get made,” Thorson wrote. “More on the process in the following paragraphs, but first we need to face the music: this game ain’t coming out in 2024. We had hoped to be announcing a firm release date around now, but it just isn’t in the cards. We know that this will be disappointing for a lot of you and we’re sorry for that. Maybe this was predictable, but still it always sucks when the haters are right.”
At the same time, Extremely OK Games has also added veteran indie game developer Kyle Pulver to the team. Thorson says she has “struggled to keep up with my workload and provide a strong direction for the team” as she navigates “all of the challenges of my personal life, including my gender transition”. That, she says, is something that Pulver is helping out immensely, injecting new energy into Earthblade’s development process.
“What pushed us to recruit Kyle was the realization that I had become the bottleneck,” Thorson explained. “I’ve struggled to keep up with my workload and provide a strong direction for the team, while navigating all of the challenges of my personal life, including my gender transition. Transition involves a lot of change, uncertainty and doubt, and it’s easy to see how that has bled into Earthblade.
“I was despairing about this and apologizing to the team recently, but Pedro [Medeiros, pixel art director] said something that helped me shift my thinking. He told me that this uncertainty was always going to be part of the process and that it wasn’t solely coming from me- we’ve all had to fight through uncertainty together to make Earthblade. Even if we could go back and do everything ‘perfectly’ from the start the result would be a different game. Despite the setbacks, we all still believe in this project, and more importantly in each other.”
Earthblade is in development for PC.
