Five 4-Color Sectors, a Wooden Body, and No Commercial Engine: How Celeste's Co-Creator Challenges Hollow Knight With City of None on Switch 2
When you have engineered the sub-pixel aerial physics of Celeste and the frantic arenas of TowerFall, stepping onto the hallowed ground of Hollow Knight is anything but a casual detour. Revealed by Noel Berry and his brother Liam Berry under the banner of Canadian indie powerhouse Extremely OK Games (EXOK), City of None channels that signature movement mastery into a brooding, interconnected Metroidvania slated for 2027 on Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Windows and Linux via Steam).
A Spirit in a Wooden Body Against the Ravenous Barons
Following its console debut during the October 2026 Nintendo Indie World showcase for Switch 2, the project drops players into a sprawling metropolis crumbling into ruin. High above the decaying streets rule the Barons, a caste of greedy overlords who sustain their power by feeding upon souls lost in time.
You awaken as one of those solitary spirits, housed inside a discarded wooden body left to rot in the wild. Armed with a swift blade and acrobatic agility, this wooden vessel ventures deep into the city's underbelly to clash with strange spirits, wicked beasts, and ferocious robots while meeting both friendly and hostile locals in a bid to wrest the city's future back from the Barons.
Five Train-Connected Sectors and Strict Four-Color Palettes
Where Celeste focused on room-by-room summit gauntlets, City of None embraces non-linear adventure and structural backtracking. The metropolis is divided into five distinct sectors linked by a central train network. Boarding the train takes players across contrasting districts, each featuring its own branching pathways, environmental hazards, and combat rhythm.
To give every district an unmistakable visual identity, the Berry brothers adopted a bold artistic constraint: each sector is rendered in a strict four-color palette inspired by classic Game Boy hardware, accompanied by promotional and concept art from illustrator Quinne Larsen. That high-contrast pixel aesthetic keeps combat razor-sharp even when the screen fills with projectiles, parries, and rapid mid-air dashes.
Exploring hidden corridors rewards players with unique items and permanent upgrades that unlock new platforming and combat abilities, including double jumps and crisp aerial bursts that immediately echo EXOK's pedigree. Furthermore, the official Steam listing (AppID 3189450) confirms an unexpected bonus for the genre: a built-in level editor will be included at launch alongside full controller support, Steam Achievements, and Steam Cloud saves.
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Rebuilding After Earthblade With the Custom Foster Framework
The arrival of City of None carries special weight for longtime followers of the studio. After the painful cancellation of Earthblade in early 2025, and just days after Maddy Thorson pulled Celeste and TowerFall from the Xbox Store over unresolved Microsoft storefront issues, Noel Berry pivoted to an intimate two-person collaboration with his brother Liam Berry, a Winnipeg-based composer handling the soundtrack, sound design, FMOD audio implementation, and co-design.
- Developers: Noel Berry and Liam Berry (concept and promo art by Quinne Larsen).
- Publisher: Extremely OK Games, Ltd. (EXOK).
- Confirmed Platforms: Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, and PC (Windows and Linux via Steam).
- Release Window: 2027.
- Engine Architecture: Built in C# without a commercial engine using Noel Berry's open-source Foster framework (powered by SDL3).
Rather than relying on heavy commercial tools like Unity or Unreal Engine, Noel Berry built City of None from the ground up in C# using his own lightweight homebrew framework, Foster. As Berry explained in his technical writing on engine-free development, owning the entire rendering and input stack ensures that no third-party corporate policy change or mandatory engine update can ever break the game's frame-perfect feel on consoles or prevent it from compiling decades from now.
My Perspective
I was genuinely heartbroken when Earthblade was cancelled last year, because seeing the minds behind Celeste tackle an interconnected Metroidvania felt like a dream match. Watching City of None in motion immediately reignited that spark for me. What captivates me most here is the tension between the stark beauty of its four-color palettes and the sheer velocity of its combat and platforming: you can feel in every jump and slash that the developer hand-coded the physics in C# without a bloated engine getting in the way. If the five train-linked sectors can match the haunting atmosphere of Hollow Knight while delivering EXOK's signature aerial precision, this is going to be one of my absolute must-play indie obsessions on Switch 2 in 2027.
Based on the outskirts of New York City, Chaya 'Chayane' spent five years studying software engineering in Montreal before returning to her home state. A Full-Stack developer and Deep Learning AI architecture researcher, she explores neural networks and algorithmic optimization while engineering data pipelines for Retrocharting and Gamescharting alongside Grimtag. A gamer for over 20 years and an avid collector of Nintendo history and The Legend of Zelda, she explored World of Warcraft's Azeroth before bringing her deep technical background to video game analysis.
