Extremely OK Games Show Off New Game With A Vibe Reveal

In a blog-post Monday, Maddy from Extremely OK Games unveiled the name of their studio’s newest game: Earthblade. In a reveal Maddy calls a “Vibe Reveal,” they show off the game’s logo, a poster a taste of the game’s soundtrack.

“We didn’t want to reveal much about the game or its story yet, but we think that this well establishes the world and the feeling of being in it,” Maddy writes. “We also just wanted to let everyone know the name of the game now that we’ve settled on one, so that we can all stop calling it EXOK4.”

Maddy warns that it may be a while before we hear anything new about Earthblade, but that fans ought to revel in the mystery, “so we’ve opted to save it all up for a big reveal that will hopefully blow your socks off,” they write in the post.

Extremely OK Games are deities behind Celeste and Towerfall: Ascension. The small team talks about their creative process in the post, specifically about finding a balance between “the unknown” and “the comfort zone.”

“The unknown is exciting, but scary and difficult. The comfort zone is safe and easy, but boring. It’s tempting as an artist to push yourself too far into the unknown, into a project that’s not going to get finished given the constraints of your circumstances (budget, time, motivation, appetite for failure),” Maddy writes. “It can also be easy to get stuck in your comfort zone producing lifeless work, particularly when there’s a lot of financial pressure.”

Maddy’s comment on lifeless work rings painfully true in the modern reality of corporate game expectations. Creations like those from Extremely OK Games represent one of the last bastions of integrity and creativity in a games market increasingly dominated by boards of directors and lifeless games made out of financial obligation.