Lena Raine released a soundtrack for Celeste studio's cancelled follow-up game Earthblade

Lena Raine, who composed most of the music for the beloved indie game Celeste, has released a concept album for Earthblade. Extremely OK Games announced in 2022 that it was developing Earthblade as its next project after Celeste, but it ultimately cancelled the project in January this year. Raine wrote in the description of EARTHBLADE ~ Across the Bounds of Fate that she cobbled together "every bit of music [she'd] written for the game to the point of its cancellation in order to tell [her] own version of it." While there's no game to dictate the tracks' sequence for the album, Raine said she arranged them "into the emotional arc of their progression, much like [she] would for any soundtrack release."

The composer cited older animation and film as inspiration for the album, such as the synths and live strings in Joe Hisaishi’s score for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, as well as Yoko Kanno's use of saxophones and percussives for Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. In addition to Celeste, Raine also wrote music for the soundtracks of Minecraft and Guild Wars 2.

Earthblade was supposed to be a 2D exploration-action game, wherein you play as Névoa, an "enigmatic child of Fate" who's returning to Earth. "Noel and I…began to reflect on how the game has felt for us to work on day-to-day, and realized that it has been a struggle for a long time," studio director Maddy Thorson said when Extremely OK cancelled the game. Programmer Noel Berry and Thorson parted ways with Extremely OK co-founder Pedro Medeiros last year, but Thorson said in her announcement of Earthblade's cancellation that Medeiros and the team for his new project "aren't the enemy."

You can now purchase the album for $7 from Bandcamp.

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