I’m not all that big on ranking games, truth be told – why would I want to catalogue a piece of art that way? But seeing as you have me at gunpoint (just pretend for me), I’ll admit I’d probably put Celeste in my top five. The platforming is tighter than any Mario entry, the art and soundtrack are stellar, and the story really hits home for me too.
You can imagine how excited I was when Earthblade, the follow-up from developer Extremely OK Games, was announced, and how upset I was when it was cancelled a couple months back. Still, we’ve been treated to a small taste of what the game might have been like in the form of a mini-album with a select set of tracks from composer Lena Raine.
Right off the bat you’ll hear Raine’s signature, synthy sound. Some tracks from the album are reminiscent of Celeste’s score, while others feel completely fresh and unique. It definitely feels like it’s going for a fantasy role-playing vibe – I’d love to know how this would have paired with the cancelled game’s action-platforming.
Raine explains over on the album’s Bandcamp page that Earthblade “Across the Bounds of Fate” is more concept album than soundtrack. “The music I wrote for the game is highly dynamic, in the tradition of what I wrote for Celeste,” she wrote. “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.”
Apparently Raine took a lot of inspiration from older animation and film, like the “huge Yamaha synths” of Blade Runner composer Vangelis, as well as the “weird textures and combination of old synths & live strings of Joe Hisaishi’s score for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” and the “haunting saxophone and percussive textures of Yoko Kanno’s work on Cowboy Bebop & Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex.” I think that Kanno influence can really be heard in particular on the sixth track, Poison in the Roots.
It’s always quite gutting when a game gets cancelled, but I’m thankful to be able to hear a little bit of Earthblade’s soundscape, especially given that 50% of the album’s sales will be donated to Trans Lifeline. Get on it!
