The official reveal of Extremely OK Games' Earthblade at The Game Awards 2022 gave fans a lot of new information about what Maddy Thorson and her team have planned for their upcoming title. The 2024 release date was a major part of that, but no less significant was the reveal that the game is going to play quite similarly to Maddy Thorson's previous indie hit Celeste. Earthblade is shaping up to be an experience with the brilliant platforming mechanics introduced in Celeste, but now with full combat and an open world.
While The Game Awards 2022 trailer revealed much of what the game will look like, Extremely OK Games' website does offer some additional context. The story of Earthblade follows Névoa, an enigmatic child of Fate who has returned to Earth after a long time away. The game is described as an "explor-action platformer" where players will travel a ruined Earth to uncover its secrets and history. The trailer also shows that there will likely be a full cast of characters for the player to befriend or potentially face off against on their journey. Earthblade's world seems not quite fantasy, not quite science-fiction, but a beautiful in-between, exemplified by its horned Earthling protagonist Névoa.
Maddy Thorson's Celeste And Earthblade's Expanded Scope
One of the biggest factors that made Celeste such an overnight success was the fluidity and dynamism of its movement mechanics. There are few games where simply navigating the environment is such an engrossing part of the experience. Celeste began as a humble game jam project in the Pico-8 game engine, a Lua-based micro-engine designed for producing retro-style experiences with a limited tool set. Even when playing the original game jam version of Celeste, it is clear that the refinement of player movement was a design priority. After spending so many years mastering the development of platforming mechanics, it makes sense that Earthblade would attempt to broaden other aspects of design rather than discard the team's previous efforts entirely.
Celeste itself was in many ways an expansion of Maddy Thorson's previous work on the Towerfall series, taking the fast-paced 2D platforming combat of that series and refining the play experience down to an atmospheric, story-driven platformer. With Earthblade, the story emphasis seems to have remained, but with the reintroduction of combat and an increased focus on world scale. Celeste did offer the opportunity to explore open-endedly, but the experience was always somewhat limited. The player had a limited set of rooms they could explore in a given area, generally for the purpose of hiding secrets and collectibles. The narrative itself though was very linear, with the player always heading towards a singular destination to find the next story beat.
Analyzing Earthblade's Trailer
The most prominent aspects of Earthblade's trailer are definitely the scale of its world, and the presence of enemy creatures the player will face as they explore that world. Celeste did not have enemies in the traditional sense, though there was a variety of moving obstacles the player had to work around. This represents a departure between the two games that will likely have major implications on how players navigate environments. The challenging platforming of Celeste may be toned down somewhat to accommodate combat, or the game could explore an even more challenging difficulty ceiling. The sweeping shots of large landscapes full of animals and greenery also evoke an almost Breath of the Wild kind of post-apocolyptia, where a magical kind of nature has begun to reclaim the world.
Some of Celeste's best exploration moments came when players were able to explore larger open areas with a variety of puzzles and micro-challenges. It will be interesting to see if Earthblade takes a similar approach to Celeste's world design and builds its open world by creating a branching set of challenges from a central hub, or if the game plans to explore a less linear level design philosophy. Even as the game remains far away, with over a year left in development, this trailer is likely just the beginning of the reveals about the game. As the release date of Earthblade draws closer, there is sure to be much more to uncover about its fascinating world.
Earthblade releases in 2024.