Celeste composer Lena Raine has just released the soundtrack for Extremely OK Games' canceled Metroidvania project Earthblade, and it's a feverishly pretty preview of a game you might never be able to play.
You can stream or purchase the soundtrack – titled Across the Bounds of Fate – from Bandcamp, where some fans are already saying they find themselves mourning "what could have been."
Across the Bounds of Fate is conducive to that kind of unrestrained longing; songs like 'Poison in the Roots' are full of restless synths and they tremble, while 'Earth's Cry' offers an elegiac piano to sweep away any tears that may start brimming.
"A lot of my inspiration for the overall sound of Earthblade came from older animation and film," Raine explains in Across the Bounds of Fate's album description. "The huge Yamaha synths of Vangelis. The weird textures and combination of old synths and live strings of Joe Hisaishi's score for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The haunting saxophone and percussive textures of Yoko Kanno's work on Cowboy Bebop."
"I did my best to arrange [the songs] into the emotional arc of their progression," Raine says. "Because we'll never get a chance to tell that story in game form, I decided to cobble together every bit of music I’d written for the game to the point of its cancellation in order to tell my own version of it."
Extremely OK Games developers Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry abruptly ceased development on Earthblade – which was meant to be a lavish sci-fi mystery – after 5 years of development due to an IP dispute over Celeste. Across the Bounds of Fate gives the lost game another chance at life.
"It's been a bit of an emotional journey," Raine says on Bluesky, "and it's all welling up again seeing folks' reactions to the music."
"I wrote the music, but [Extremely OK Games] made the world that inspired it," she continues. "It may not have been finished, but I hope this helps to archive what we did together."
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