Owlboy creator's Chrono Break mockup is a beautiful teaser for a sequel that will never exist

15 years ago, there was still hope that the dream team behind Chrono Trigger would reunite to make another Chrono game. That hope was mostly fueled by a trademark for a game called Chrono Break, which was never officially announced. Square Enix never talked about it directly, but here and there over the years some of the developers mentioned being interested in making a sequel. It didn't happen. But if it did, maybe it would've looked something like this.

This mockup of Chrono Break is the work of pixel artist Simon Andersen, who created Owlboy and worked on this project as a way to wind down from its long development. "After finishing a massive game project spanning a decade of development, I was ready to tackle a new series. I had already known for years I wanted to explore a hypothetical sequel to Chrono Trigger, Cross and Radical Dreamers, but it took me a full year until I figured out how I wanted it to look," he wrote.

Andersen makes it as clear as possible that this is not an actual game project in development, and that's for the best—Square famously shut down a Chrono Trigger fangame, Chrono Resurrection, back in 2004. Andersen's video is just a mockup, which he's been working on for the past two months. "If the sequel that was planned years ago was revived, this is likely how I would do it."

Even so, it's nice to think about what could have been, in the alternate timeline where Chrono Trigger got another sequel. Especially one with such beautiful pixel art, which feels rooted in the original game's style but with far more detail than the Super Nintendo was capable of.