Earthblade, the next game from Celeste developer Extremely OK Games, was sadly cancelled earlier this year following what studio founder Maddy Thorson described as “a disagreement about the IP rights of Celeste”. We only got a very small taste of what this follow-up would offer — a Game Awards reveal trailer and the odd blog post — but now composer Lena Raine has shared a “concept album” of her work on the project and, expectedly, it sounds beautiful (thanks, Eurogamer).
‘EARTHBLADE ~ Across the Bounds of Fate’ is now available to listen to and buy on Bandcamp. It consists of nine brand new tracks, both “conceptual and implemented”, which Raine hopes will tell her own version of the game, and draws inspiration from the likes of Vangelis, Joe Hisaishi’s work on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Yoko Kanno’s Cowboy Bebop score.
We won’t go into every track here, but, in short, if you were a fan of Raine’s work on the likes of Celeste, Chicory and Deltarune, this is well worth a listen.
Here’s how Raine describes the collection in the Bandcamp album description:
Across the Bounds of Fate, more so than a soundtrack, is a concept album. The music I wrote for the game is highly dynamic, in the tradition of what I wrote for Celeste. I took it many steps beyond, in ways that temporally-constrained pieces of music can’t really do justice. But I did my best to arrange them into the emotional arc of their progression, much like I would for any soundtrack release.
While we are never going to get the chance to see Earthblade, the composer hopes to revisit the vibes created for this album on a future project. “For now,” Raine concludes the album description, “tuck in and enjoy around 30 minutes of music that paint the picture of what I hoped Earthblade might be”.
In a blog post announcing Earthblade’s cancellation back in January, Thorson confessed that she “feel[s] many ways about it, but one big feeling is undoubtedly relief”. According to that post, the team has now gone back to prototyping in an attempt to “rediscover game development” as they did previously with Celeste and TowerFall.
