Something I’ve always loved about fighting games is that the first time you pick up the game you get to play the same game as the 10,000th time. There is “progression” in fighting games - you can obviously improve so much at them that the game ceases to remotely resemble what it used to look like. But the change here takes place in your mind, and in your muscle memory - the character you are wielding does not become more powerful, you become more powerful.

I’d argue most games opt not to take this route, instead being structured around making the character progressively more powerful as the game goes on. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - the megaman franchise (notably the early megaman X games) certainly points to how it could be done artfully - but I think a good percentage of the time this is used to make the player feel like they are improving when they are actually just controlling a stronger avatar. This is part of the reason why I am so rarely ever able to take RPGs seriously, and why games like Undertale impressed me so much¹. Games where grinding for gear and experience is so important typically feel to me like some sort of Skinner Box Lord of the Rings reboot where you have to watch all of Frodo's walking in between the interesting parts of his journey.

The really great thing about Celeste was that, barring chapter 7, you control the same character in every screen. The levels actually get harder by being more difficult slowly over time, which sounds obvious but is actually frighteningly difficult to control for when designing levels (anyone who has ever played Mario Maker would be able to attest to this). In fact, chapter 8 makes your character weaker instead of making the player artificially confident. You’ll never reach a screen in this game that makes you think “well, I just can’t do this, it’s impossible, I’ll come back after I unlock the ability I need to clear this obstacle”. You can clear all of them, right now.

More granularly, pretty much every screen in the game requires you to clear the entire thing without making any mistakes, because every hit kills you and sends you back to the start of the screen. This is felt most strongly on the C-sides, which are relatively short chapters featuring extremely long screens. You could do 90% of the screen perfect, die on the last obstacle, and get sent back to the beginning, having made no progress. I imagine a lot of people found this aspect very frustrating, but I thought it was awesome; the key aspect here is that these long screens do have progression, and do get easier over time.

It's just that the progression is in your mind, not on the screen.

There’s a lot of climbing imagery in this game, and I think using rock climbing terminology to describe the levels is pretty fitting. In rock climbing, “Routes” or “Problems” are static: they don’t move, they don’t change. The problems get easier every time you try them, but not because the problem is actually transforming in any way, but because each attempt provides you a bit of information about the solution to each move, or “beta”. Some routes are short, and some are easy, meaning for the most part you can first-try, or “flash” them without difficulty. Other problems are long and difficult, and require time spent “projecting” them. This can just be a few tries, or several days across multiple sessions.

In Celeste, there is a lot of this similar range of difficulty across screens that makes the process of scaling Celeste mountain appropriately similar to the process of climbing a mountain - some parts are easy, some parts you fall off a lot. The game explicitly encourages you to not sweat the falls, at one point literally telling you to be proud of your death count since it represents progress.

Notably absent from this game, working in concert with this idea, is lives / oneups / game-overs. You’re not actually punished for dying pretty much ever, because not clearing the obstacle is punishment enough - you can try again and again until you finally get it perfect.

No system of rewards will ever be more rewarding than play for its own sake

— Matt Thorson 🍂 (@MattThorson) September 6, 2018

It feels good to send a hard project that you put your soul into working on. It feels good to be rewarded after pushing yourself and accomplishing something that seemed impossibly hard at first - clearing Chapter 7 C-Side was one of the most excited I’ve ever been playing a video game, maybe ever for a single-player game. I think Celeste is so easy to get excited about because the motivation to climb Celeste mountain is as much yours as it is Madeline’s. The player is the one working really hard to overcome all the obstacles, and relating to Madeline’s desire to push herself isn’t just something you’re watching. It’s something that, through playing the game, you experience for yourself.

In general I think games like Celeste are sort of a dying breed. My tinfoil hat theory here is that older games were much shorter due to the games being limited to less disk space, so to create 40 hours of gameplay you had to make your 20-30 minute game impossibly hard so players would have to play the same levels many times to beat it. In the new era of gaming, space is a laughable non-concern, and gaming companies have largely figured out that most people playing video games are looking to relax, not to be pushed hard. This isn’t a bad thing (relaxation is great!) but it makes it difficult for people who love to be challenged to find worthy challenges. I remember talking recently to someone about how new games for people like this just don’t exist anymore, that the niche of people who like them is too small to be worth marketing to. Celeste proved me wrong here - it showed me that games like this are still being made, that people still like them, and that they are still fun.

Platformers are arguably the most recognizable gaming genre to exist, and as you might expect there's a sub-group of platformer players that go out of their way to make platforming games that are as hard as possible. There's a number of games that are typically associated with this genre, but I think the easiest way to explain the general feel and appeal to these games is by Guy Collins's "Kaizo Trap" music video, which is based on the famous Kaizo Mario romhacks of Super Mario World. The vibe should be familiar to anybody who played Celeste and it's lovingly animated so please watch it:

This is why I was so amused to find out that one of the creators of Celeste, Matt Thorson, was also the creator of the "Jumper" games, one of the most iconic ultra-difficult freeware platforming-games.

You might recognize Matt Thorson's name attached to stuff like An Untitled Story, Runman, Towerfall, and other stuff, but Thorson's name being attached to Jumper in particular is great because it makes it certainly non-coincidental that Celeste exists so perfectly inside this genre.

The Boss: Did you fill the hallways with nonsensical, lethal yet vaguely passable obstacles?

Lackey: Yes, and we have all the standard electricity, spikes, and fireballs in position.

• Jumper 2

There are two games I want to talk briefly about with regards to this genre in particular: I Wanna Be the Guy and Kaizo Mario World.

Something I want to briefly touch upon is how rarely the game ever instructs you, and how unobtrusive that rare instruction is.

Above is the first 9 minutes of the game, which I think is really similar in function to the intro stage of Mega Man X in that it's a fairly natural introduction to almost all of the important mechanics in the game. Egoraptor has a decent video about how that game uses the intro stage for establishing the theme and teaching the player the goals, which I will not be linking due to the decidedly 2011 humor that was remarkably unfunny upon rewatching it for this review. (Feel free to dig it up though, the examples used aren't bad if you can put up with his jokes)

The reason I bring up Egoraptor's video is that he touches upon the idea of conveyance, which What Games Are wonderfully describes as follows

Conveyance is a technique for teaching the rules of a game, and the pattern of its dynamic, to the player without specifically telling her what to do. Conveyance relies on the player to learn simple lessons for which she then figures out more complicated uses, and so the process of grokking the game and learning the game become one and the same.²

The game tells you to relax, places you in a low stress environment, and lets you run around a little bit. You might fall into the bottomless pit at the start and die, but you're placed immediately back at the start, teaching you that you get to try again when you mess up. Eventually, you walk underneath the big block that starts threatening rumbling and, after a long period where you can get out of the way, falls where you used to be. The game shows you that things other than you move, and can (likely) harm you if you don't react to them.

After this you're introduced to the bird that tells you how to climb the walls. This is about as unintrusive as a tutorial can possibly get. It doesn't interrupt you annoyingly, it doesn't talk to you, there's no textboxes, and you can literally just ignore it if you already know what to do. The game provides you with a few more examples where you can try out the thing it just taught you at your own pace. The game continues to the bridge, which begins falling, and just when you think you're about to fall to your death the bird comes back and teaches you about dashing in the same way.

This bird in particular was, weirdly enough, one of my favorite parts of the whole game. This bird comes back several times throughout the game, just sort of hanging out in the background, shouting out some vague command whose utility is your responsibility to figure out. I remember feeling frequently impressed with how easy it was for the levels to teach you even very difficult mechanics to explain with words just by using this bird. My favorite example comes from the Summit B-side

I love this because you aren't explicitly told what is supposed to happen, and since you're only moving vertically you have an arbitrary number of safe attempts at this to learn the proper timing for it. You learn this and instantly you begin thinking about it every time you dash vertically near a wall - it permeates the way you think about levels instantly. The only time Celeste ever pulls you out of the game to teach you something is the one time you're instructed on dashing in the intro stage, which serves as dramatic tension / shows you the gravity³ behind falling into bottomless pits.

For the most part, Celeste trusts you to figure things out by experimenting with them, which is an impressive amount of agency granted to the player in my opinion.

The nice thing about the story in Celeste is that it is mostly optional, being mostly overlayed on top of the actual gameplay. I think one of the weaker parts of indie platformers as a genre is that they shoebox the player a bit too hard into the story. Most people interested in platformers are typically used to the Super Mario Brothers style of plot (i.e. "the princess is in trouble, go save her" with no interruption beyond that), so games that pull too strongly upon the story despite mostly being about platforming usually detract from the experience.

Every cutscene is immediately skippable, and no information gathered from cutscenes is pretty much ever necessary to clear the game. It's very possible that you could skip every cutscene on your first playthrough and still enjoy the game without a problem, mostly owing to the excellent art style of the game. Threatening things look threatening, desirable things look desirable, goals are always easily identifiable, and the gameplay is linear enough that the next screen is pretty much all you ever need to think about.

That said, I found the story to be a very strong point of the game. It's cute, relateable, and surprisingly optimistic despite being centered around normally heavy topics like mental illness and self-discovery.

I won't dive too deep into the bits of the story just in case anyone is interested in playing the game without having the entire game spoiled for them. That said, I have a few short thoughts on the story that might be considered light spoilers so if that bothers you please play the game before continuing.

The first of two thoughts I had about this game was that it's treatment of mental illness was one I found very refreshing, managing to capture Madeline's struggle pretty well, including her misunderstandings of what will end up working. Most notable for me was in the cutscene after Chapter 5, where Madeline confronts the dark part of herself and tells her that she is going to "let go" of her. I was originally sort of let down by this, because the idea that you can just cast off the bad parts of yourself is more self-help-drivel and less real-solution-to-problem. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that trying this made Madeline fall off the mountain entirely, and that her reaching the summit eventually required her to make peace with herself instead, rather than trying to ignore parts of herself altogether. On the whole I found it very down-to-earth; it reminded me that at times, you just have to breathe.

The second of two thoughts ties into the idea of Hard Platformers as a Sub-Genre I mentioned before. A lot of Madeline's motivation for climbing the mountain is that she just wants to prove to herself that she's capable of doing it, which I think the intense difficulty of the game itself mirrors in a wonderfully satisfying way. You might be midway through playing the C-sides and think "why am I even bothering to do this?" to which your own answer, funnily enough, is the same answer Madeline gives for climbing Celeste mountain.

Because I think I can do it, and I need to prove it to myself.

There's a bunch of much nerdier minutae-oriented thoughts I had about Celeste, and those are going here at the end. Feel free to skip these if you're not that invested in what I thought of the game's physics / controller support / UI / etc.

I genuinely think that if you like platformers and have not already played through Celeste, you are doing yourself a great disservice. Completing the game through the C-sides will certainly not appeal to everybody, but the nice thing about Celeste is that you don't go that far to "beat" it. Similar to how MMOs typically structure their content towards "endgame", most of Celeste "happens" after you beat it, in the B and C sides. The "core" game is not a huge commitment and not overly difficult if that's something that would put you off, so even if you're not interested in throwing yourself at a very challenging project of a game I still consider Celeste among the better games you could purchase right now.

Celeste truly has it all, and I am very happy to have played it⁴.