The Musical Ghost of EARTHBLADE

Lena Raine is far from an unknown name. Her soundtrack to the 2018 indie platformer Celeste is considered by many to be among the greatest video game soundtracks in existence, and Earthblade was poised to join it... that is until the game was unceremoniously canceled in December 2024 after disputes within the developing team split up ownership of the assets and code. This was heartbreaking to hear after waiting nearly 6 years for the next game from Extremely OK. Fortunately, all was not lost.

EARTHBLADE ~ Across the Bounds of Fate

Early last year, Raine provided a small salve to the loss of Earthblade. EARTHBLADE ~ Across the Bounds of Fate is, in the tradition of Raine's prior soundtracks, a thoughtfully composed representation of the auditory experience of the game in question-- except in this case it's also a concept album depicting what Raine had hoped for the emotional journey of Earthblade which we will now never experience.

For as much as I love video game music (VGM), I so wish other composers would take the care to release soundtracks as purposeful as Lena Raine's. Since VGM often needs to loop in-game and games often have such expansive total soundtracks, soundtrack albums almost universally suffer from bloat and from a lack of an emotional arc track-to-track. They might contain good music, but they likely aren't particularly great album experiences.

Raine bucks this trend and makes soundtrack albums which play just as well as any ordinary record, where the songs develop naturally and without limit, and where the track-to-track progression lacks stumbles or large swings in tone. Here on Across the Bounds of Fate this becomes an essential ingredient, since we will never experience the soundtrack of Earthblade anywhere outside of this release. Other soundtracks can rely on the listener's experience with the game to sort of patch up the emotional connection with the soundtrack record, playing off nostalgia and existing memories. Across the Bounds of Fate does not have this advantage, and for that it is a unique experience within VGM.

Across the Bounds of Fate is a tight 30 minutes of atmospheric electronic and ambient music that builds scenes of lush landscapes through a colourful and dense sensory experience. In the more active sections the softly lilting rhythms and long melodic contours create a shimmering, effervescent, dream-like quality. It's especially effective on a track like "Child of the Earth", which uses deep, resonant chords with a light tape-looping effect to create a dark juxtaposition with the bright greenery depicted. These contrasts lend the album a feeling of simultaneous beauty and mystery.

There's also plenty of instrumentation that calls to mind the best of Lena Raine's compositions on Celeste and Celeste: Farewell. The song "Verdant Mysteries" uses staccato strings and soft piano arpeggios to make an airy, uplifting ambiance which is built on later in the track by round, moog-like synths that call to mind Mort Garson's legendary Plantasia, an undeniable influence on the naturalistic approach taken here.

The two longest tracks, "Poison in the Roots" and "LINEAGE", are far and away my favourite cuts from the album. Both are slow building and soothing in their own ways. "LINEAGE" slowly builds on a plucky synth melody straight out of Minecraft with tender piano and string orchestration. The song feels in many ways like a lighter reflection of the untenable darkness displayed throughout Raine's soundtrack of Celeste's Mirror Temple. It uses somber string and piano melodies not to create an air of feeling watched, but to give the feeling of life, like you're the observer to a vast array of unfamiliar lifeforms. "Poison in the Roots" opens with more present instrumentation, including a wonderfully distorted, rising-and-falling saw-tooth synth alongside dramatic string stabs and lilting vocals. But where this track gets truly great is with its horn performances from Nahor Gomes and Cesar Roversi on trumpet and soprano saxophone respectively. The two play a lightly conversational set of solos, layering over top of one another and complementing the prominent bass line and continuing electronic melodies excellently.

This review has been in the works for a while, gathering dust on my proverbial shelf for nearly a year, so I hope you can forgive my tardiness with the album's March 2025 release date. I'm anxious to see what both Extremely OK games and Lena Raine have in store next-- but at least I know that if it all goes belly-up Raine still has our back.

-Paul Taylor

(Assistant News Director at WXOU)