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…