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The developer of indie hit Celeste has revealed its next game is no longer releasing in 2024 but is still "making progress."
On March 27, Maddy Thorson, director of R&D at Extremely OK Games, penned a blog post to expectant fans to update them on Earthblade's development. First and foremost, the developer thanks fans for their patience as "we try our best to make this video game that appears to be stubbornly determined to not get made" before letting them down gently: "This game ain't coming out in 2024."
In an ideal world, Extremely OK Games wanted to announce a firm release date for Earthblade around this time, "but it just isn't in the cards," Thorson writes. As disappointing as this news is, there is a silver lining: "The good news is that the game is not stagnant, we are still making progress and we're still excited to work on it."
Part of this progress sees the team hire a new member, developer Kyle Pulver. As the blog post reveals, Pulver is also an indie game veteran and has been a friend of the studio for several years now. He also just so happens to be the world champion of TowerFall - Thorson and Co's 2013 game that released before Celeste.
"Kyle quickly approached us with big ideas, which can be scary for everyone involved. But it was clear that he's not here to derail the project," Thorson writes. "He's identifying our vision and the problems preventing the game from living up to it and working with us to pinpoint solutions. Plus his fresh eyes have inspired all of us to see things anew," the post continues.
Earthblade was announced back in 2021 and was described as a "2D explor-action game in a seamless pixel art world." At the time, the game was given a '20XX' release window, before it was revealed that the team was aiming for a 2023 launch. This obviously isn't the case anymore but by the sounds of the blog post, Extremely OK Games' next project is going through a lot of changes that'll be worth the wait.
Take a look at our upcoming indie games list to find out what else we've got to look forward to.
