With the huge success of Celeste, there was a lot of excitement about Earthblade, its developers next game. Another 2D platformer/adventure game set in a beautiful interconnected world, the title had you play as Névoa in their attempt to explore a ruined Earth and piece together its past.
It was a fantastic looking game, and one whose reveal at the 2022 Game Awards sparked a lot of excitement in the gaming community.
Unfortunately, it seems fate had other plans here. Why? Because due to some dissatisfaction with the project and behind the scenes disagreements at Extremely OK Games, the team have decided to cancel the project. Here’s their post detailing the cancellation:
Hey everyone, I’ve got some sad news today to ring in 2025. Late last month, Noel and I made the difficult decision to cancel Earthblade.
Earthblade Final Update (Extremely OK Games)
It’s not much of a long read, but to summarise, it really came down to a mix of factors.
First, Pedro, the art director on Earthblade (and longtime pixel artist on Celeste) had a falling out with the others over the rights to the Celeste IP. As a result, he decided to move on from the company and start work on his own games instead, with a title called Neverway being his current project.
Secondly, the team realised they were struggling to find the motivation to work on the project. It had become a slog for the team, and something they felt was taking far longer than they felt it should have.
So, they decided it wasn’t worth continuing with the project. That if the project was this much of a slog to work on, that it perhaps wasn’t the best idea to force themselves to keep working on it.
And honestly? We 100% admire them for that decision. Yes, Earthblade could (and likely would) have been a great game. Yes, they could make it purely for the money or attention, regardless of how miserable the development process might have been.
But would that have been worth it?
Honestly, the answer is probably no. If your game or other project is stressing you out to no end, and progress has slowed down to a complete crawl, you have to ask yourself what you’re still working on it for. Life’s too short to force yourself to work on something that makes you miserable, even if it could potentially be a good financial decision later down the line.
So, it was probably the right move to cancel the game here. Yeah, it’s not great news for fans, and it’s certainly disappointing given the quality of their previous game…
But the people behind the project matter too, and they shouldn’t be forced to work on something that’s stressing everyone out just for the sake of appeasing random strangers on the internet.
Still, what did you think? Are you disappointed to see Earthblade get canned? At what point should a game or other creative project be cancelled if it’s not living up to its creators’ expectations anyway?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below, on social media, or over on our Discord server today.
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