Celeste (PC): Conquering Your Mountain.

Contrary to what a lot of people may think, I don't actually play every video game that comes out. It's not for lack of trying, mind you. People are exhausting, I have to talk to them, engage with them, Leave my house to see them? Ugh. But despite my best efforts to dig myself into my private little hole with games, the fact is there are so many developers putting out content it's nearly impossible to keep up with all of it. 

So sometimes, a game that is critically acclaimed or very popular sometimes gets by me. Sometimes I never notice it, sometimes I never have time. Now this one I didn't know very much about but I did know its name and primary character. Every time I'd see a stream mention or play it the chat would go bonkers about it. It got to the point where I felt I missed out. So with me looking to rip through some steam games on my stream, and a fresh batch of summer sale games, I finally sat down with.....

CELESTE(PC)

We start off Celeste in control of a young woman with orangey red hair and a blue winter jacket named Madeline. She has left home to come to Mt. Celeste with an unexplainable urge to reach its summit. At the base of the mountain she crosses path with a polite but discouraging old woman who warns Madeline that she should not try to climb this mountain.

Ignoring her warning, Madeline begins her ascent of the mountain. After a brief starting climb, Madeline makes camp for the night to prepare for the next part of her climb. But as she sleeps, she dream where are dark reflection of herself breaks from her mirror reflection. This doppelganger, which she calls a "Part of Me" condescendingly tries to impede Madeline from climbing, at first with words but then by force. Madeline awakens visibly shaken but not deterred from her goal, and continues her ascent.

So when I first fired up Celeste I had an immediate ping of familiarity to the overall design and controls. One quick google search showed me that Celeste comes from Matt Makes Games studios, which is dev team that produced Towerfall: Ascension which is a game that I very much enjoy and has been a staple of my yearly Extra Life charity stream. So right out of the gate hopes were riding hire than if I had gone in cold.

Celeste at its core is a pixel based precision platformer that starts off with simple, tight controls that will gradually ramp up in difficulty as you learn new tricks, and progress further up the mountain. There are 7 total story chapters in total and one bonus epilogue chapter. 

Now when I say a term like "precision platformer" I usually think of games like Super Meat Boy and their controller snappingly frustrating difficulty. Thankfully Celeste doesn't start out that rough. The chapters are basically broken down into a hybrid of an over arching map that are connected by single screen challenged. Some of them fit onto a single screen, some of them will scroll as you move along.

Sometimes a level will just click and you fly through it, and those moments are immensely satisfying. 

Generally these are all connected on a single straight forward path but you aren't always locked out from backtracking if you need to go back for something. This is only necessary if you are a competitionist, as most of the time you really just need to progress further. In some later stages keys might be required to progress forward and those maps will have a more circular sprawling design, but this isn't a game where you typically get lost.

The core mechanics in Celeste are just a few abilities. You have a jump button, you have a dash button that you can use once in any direction, and you have a grab button that allows you to grab on walls and climb them. Your dash will recharge if you land on solid ground, or hit specific level context items (such as bounce springs or bubbles, for example). If a few short instances you can also use your wall grab to carry something.  But ultimately, those are all the controls in the game.

Whelp. That is unfortunate.

Each chapter is defined with their each unique level quirk that Madeline has to incorporate in order to each stage. For example, in the first run of stages you will come across various sized mechanical boxes that are connected via a chain loop. If you land on or grab the side of it it will cause the chain to active to move the box. These can be used to reach new areas, get into better jumping positions, or used as a launcher to get more height on your jump.  

In addition to these, there are hazards in every level be them pit falls, spikes, enemy npcs and so on. A person in one of my streams referred to the game as a resource management game, and that's a surprisingly apt comparison. The concept of the level design may be fairly obvious, but you need to manage to do it using the limited amount of dash and grab stamina you have to get to your next safe landing. The game has pretty clear indications of your limits, too. Madeline's hair changes color when she uses her dashes, and she blinks when her stamina is going to give out.

The design does a good job of teaching you how it works easily before throwing harder setups at you

Like stated earlier, the game's difficulty starts off pretty genteel but it ratchets up in a real hurry. Because of this, thankfully, there is no lives system and checkpoints tend to be pretty plentiful. Pretty much every screen transition is a checkpoint, and in some longer maps you have some sporadic mid level checkpoints. It loads quickly so dying is a momentary inconvenience. But you are going to die, and you are going to die a lot so get used to it.

Along the way in Celeste you will find collectibles as well. Primarily in the form of winged strawberries, cassette tapes, and crystal hearts. Thankfully, none of these are required to actually complete the game, but the game does keep track of them, and the ending card changes only sightly depending on how many of the strawberries you collect. These are what will test your mettle in Celeste, more so than just completing the level.

The cassette tapes and crystal hearts are more rare than the which are much more difficult to find or collect. But these serve a purpose in unlocking more game content. If you collect more of the cassette tapes you unlock the B-side levels, which are basically more challenging versions of the maps you've done. Manage to collect all the crystal hearts, and you unlock the C-side levels. So while the story may only be 4-8 hours long, you have a whole lot of game content to unlock as well.

As you can see, the B-side levels are really going to test your ability.

If you have played Towerfall: Ascension before then the graphics are going to seem real familiar. It uses incredibly low res, yet finely detailed miniature pixel sprites. It's actually very impressive. None of the actual character pixels have facial details, but all of their animations cycles are detailed enough to see exactly what limbs are moving, or what separates her from something she carries. 

The levels are designed with very vibrant and contrasting colors so with the exception of where some levels are moving at a quicker clip, it's very easy to distinguish what parts of the level are fore and background, and what elements of the stage you can interact with. Granted I am always a sucker for great sprite animation, but there was a lot of meticulous care here to make sure that the levels are all designed in complimenting palettes to keep within the theme of the level as well. The effects for dashing, stamina, wind, snow are all complimentary without them overpowering the general level design.

They also do a couple of nifty little visual tricks with the conversations in the game as well. Each character's text box is unique to them and when they enunciate certain points of effect the text in certain lines will shake, wave, bounce, and so on. The character faces in the boxes also switch due to emotion which really adds the character, almost to the point of 4th wall breaking at certain points which I exceptionally liked. It does a lot with a little to really build the characters where they can in this one, and I liked that a lot.

I struggled in this segment a bit because I couldn't get the timing of the dash down.
Never could time the bounce off his head correctly.

Celeste features an incredibly chill soundtrack from the mind of Lena Raine. You would think that the music would be designed to be more dramatic or uptempo, but theorize that wasn't for a couple of reasons. Primarily, I feel is soundtrack is designed in a way to produce a more calming effect. Because of the very nature of the gameplay, you are going to be met with some frustration. But by having this relaxing chill ambiance in the background, I never found myself getting as angry as I usually do with games like this. Sure I got mad and yelled a few times, but they were few and far between. I have a real hard time describing what genre of music this would fall under, but this would be great to try to sleep to. 

But the other reason, and probably the reason the game is so universally acclaimed is that it works to compliment the story. You'll note from my opening that the story introduction is somewhat bare bones. The reason for this is because much of the actual character development isn't handed to you at the onset, you get little nuggets as you play through the game and meet other characters. Specifically a fellow traveler named Theo. 

You come to learn that while Madeline is headstrong and courageous to the point of stubborn, But that she is also deeply, deeply troubled. She suffers from deep seeded depression and anxiety, and through conversations with characters also reveals that she suffers from regular panic attacks. She has poor coping mechanisms, she self medicates with alcohol, and basically lashes out online. She doesn't really have a reason for wanting to climb Mt. Celeste outside of doing so to spite herself.

via Gfycat

I can see from this why so many reviews empathized with Madeline. She is a great character and very relatable. Almost too relatable. Spoiler warning but in the later stages of the game you have a conversation with Theo where Madeline comes clean about a lot of the problems she sufferers from. A lot of them hit close to home for me, frighteningly close to home. Almost as if the game was directly provoking me about it. 

Celeste was definitely developed with a personal story to tell. These experiences feel real and personable, and for those who don't struggle with these issues it provides a decent window to what it's like to have these kind of vices. They humanize the characters, make them feel real as opposed to just being characters in a game. There is a truly exceptional sequence of the game where Madeline tries to face the "Part of Myself" which becomes a harrowing chase sequence of stages where the bright colors of the background are corrupted by the dark tones of her dark side, and you have to cut through them to make the recede. It's probably the emotionally strongest point of the game.

Easily probably my favorite part of the game not just for gameplay, but also for story and use of visuals.

And once you start to connect the dots? Everything in the game becomes an analogy for dealing with anxiety and depression. The challenge of climbing a mountain, getting stuck in a particularly difficult patch, falling back down and trying to climb back up, dealing with people who want to help but don't really understand. That is really where the cleverness of the story takes it hold, because almost every aspect of the game loops back to the central themes. It's smart writing.

But as you can tell from a few paragraphs ago I wasn't as moved by it as so many of it seem to be.  Perhaps because I have currently dealt with similar problems I didn't affect me as strongly. Perhaps because the description of the issues felt a little bit lip service, and didn't delve deep enough to really emphasis the crushing nature of these feelings. I would have loved if they found a visual shorthand to incorporate into the mechanics. Like if moments when she's having anxiety/depression, the gravity effects change in the level. I'm not a game developer though and admittedly, I am probably being somewhat unfair because of personal reasons compared to the layperson playing the game.

Low blow, game. 

Now, from a purely technical standpoint? Celeste as a game leaves me with virtually no complaints, and that is pretty rare as I've always said every game has faults. The controls are tight and intuitive, the music and visuals are consistent to the theming, the story is well constructed but not so dense that it doesn't disrupt the game pacing, and the levels and overall play time are just the right length so that it doesn't become so frustrating that I stop or become bored with the game.

The only real complaint that I have can't even really be marked against it because it's literally the nature of the gameplay. In some of the later stages of the game, the pathways to solve a level require near pixel perfect precision. There is a late stage level where you have to course of 6-9 frame perfect air dashes through very tight corridors of spikes that I was just 100% certain I was never going to get through. It was frustrating, but I can't hold it against the game because this is exactly what the game is designed to be.

via Gfycat

There is no doubt that Celeste deserves the praise that its earned from it's merits. It's easily one of the most technically sound games I've ever played. But I don't feel the experience was as emotionally powerful as many reviews made it out to be. Perhaps because of the sparring nature of the storytelling and limited number of characters and time with them effected my stance on that, because it didn't have the emotional punch like games like Undertale or Persona 4 do with me so I do feel like there's a bit of puffery here.

Celeste isn't a game that reinvented the wheel, but ultimately it didn't need to. It kept to its core mechanics and polished them to an absolute mirror finish to produce a fine precision platformer with great soundtrack, heartwarming characters, and sizeable playtime. For 20 bucks you get a great amount of entertainment for your dollar, and honestly despite finishing the story I expect to come back to this one to get more collectibles.  Celeste was a great game and is absolutely worthy of a high recommendation, I just wish I got to have the experience everyone else seemed to.

Seriously, Madi explaining how she deals read like
the developers have been spying on me. >:|

Devil May Cry 5 (PS4): A B ranked combo

My mom knows practically nothing about video games. Usually when she buys me games she sticks to lists that I've made. But on occasion she'll take a shot in the dark and take a chance on something that looked interesting to her. This is how I discovered Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. A game I initially thought was stupid but ended up being an incredibly solid Legend of Zelda style of adventure that I flippin' loved.

She hit on it again in the PS2 era, when the first of this franchise came out. At the time I had only vaguely heard of it, but it featured a commercial of a dude sleepwalking and pulling a sword off his wall before cutting his room to ribbons. The game was a smash success and after multiple iterations and almost 6 years of disappearance this series finally comes back in.....

DEVIL MAY CRY 5: (PS4)

Five years after the events of Devil May Cry 4, we start off in medias res with longtime Devil May Cry protagonist Dante squaring off against a new demon in a massive tower and he is accompanied by a 90's Trent Reznor looking dude who goes by the name of V. The fight is not going well and just as he's about to be finished, Nero from Devil May Cry 4 makes his appearance to try to stop this new evil as well.

The battle does not go as well as he hoped. We flash back to the events that started this: Nero has started his own branch of Devil May Cry demon hunting with girlfriend Kyrie, and his engineer friend Nico. He is ambushed by a man in ragged clothes who cuts off his devil arm and teleports away using the Yamato sword.

Days later we see V enter Dante's Devil May Cry office to hire his crew to slay a returning demon called Urizen. He has planted a demonic tree in Red Grave City called Quiphoth that is basically ripping the blood from the denizens to produce fruit that the demon is collecting. This brings us to where we started the game, and we pick up the action a month from then.

Bringing the Edgelord since 1998

Leave it to Devil May Cry to keep things simple *cough*. So it's interesting to see that this installment of the game goes back to the established canon of the story as opposed to the rebooted version of the game. I guess because the backlash against it? I dunno, I thought it was fine. And honestly it was so early in the DMC timeline that it really could have served as a prequel without disrupting the established canon of the previous games. In any case, were are now back to the front end of the current timeline.

So Capcom has realized lately that if they just modernize the wheel, instead of reinvent it, fans will fall back into step. So what we have in DMC5 is a basically a celebration of the previous iterations with some splashes of new thrown in. The controls of the game stay fundamentally the same to every iteration you have come to know with this series with your light attack, heavy attack, pistols, jump dodge, aim control scheme.  But they do sightly differ depending on the character that you use.

There is some challenge in this one, but this is not the hardest DMC I've ever played.

When playing as Nero, you will find that the control scheme hearkens back to how they did in DMC4 where you have your series of sword and gun moves, but you have a dedicated button to using your arm. You don't have the Devil Arm in this one so instead you will use an interchangeable set of robot arms with various abilities. In addition to that, Nero's Sword, the Red Queen, has the ability to be rev'd up for additional fire damage.

Dante is DMC classic mode, or more accurately Dante is DMC3 mode. While swords are guns are his mainstay, Dante is able to switch between the 4 fighting styles he was able to use before in Trickster, Gunslinger, Swordmaster, and Royalguard. In addition to having these and the multiple weapons he can use, Dante still has access to the Devil Trigger which is what allows him to go full demon mode for high intensity damage and combos for a limited time.

Dante is easily the most versatile of the cast, and using him is like slipping into a well broken in pair of shoes. 

V is the newbie of the group and because of story line context he is significantly weaker than the other two, so he fights with a more ranged summoning style. Sure, you can get in range and swing your staff, but you will pretty much get iced. Instead, V can summon various types of familiars depending on your button inputs that range from a lithe and nimble panther, to a large hulking golem. Once an enemy is weak enough V can dish out a finishing blow with his cane to shatter an enemy. This is the only way to finish them. V also has his own variant of the Devil Trigger as well.

Combat once again is graded depending on how well you combo your abilities together while avoiding damage and affects your total score per fight, which I believe does result in some payoff of red orbs to unlock more abilities as well. So depending on your favored play style you will find a character that you fit into a groove with and score well, and one that you will not. In my case I managed to rank very high with V and always had shit ranks with Nero.

To Nero's credit, a lot of the Arms do give him a number of different abilities to use,
It just would have been nice to switch on the fly to really get the full potential of them.

Stages are broken down in a a somewhat hybrid mechanic of how they used to be in DMC4 and the DmC: Reboot. Each stage generally you flip to what character is going to be the focus and then you basically play through a predetermined path. I would almost venture to say that it is arcadey of sorts because it doesn't feel like there is a whole lot of room for exploration. There is the occasional secret here an there but not a whole lot of freedom to explore your surroundings it felt like. It's infinitely better than the narrow path/open void skyboxes from the reboot, but ultimately its not difficult to find out where you are going.

There apparently is also some strange online mechanic to the game as well. When you play certain chapters of the game apparently there are other events that take place with the other characters at this same time. During these chapters and online player actually takes control of the other character and then at the end of the level you are asked to grade their helpfulness. I am going to be 100% honest I have no idea if I ever actually saw another player. I can think of one level where I was playing as V where I had a Nero running around, but I had no idea if it was an AI or a Player. So whenever I got a prompt I just gave them a good rating. They weren't impeding me, so that seems like enough.

Motorcycle that turns into twin maces? Sure, why not. 

Music in this one was solid, although if at this point a little samey for the series. It's opening theme of "Devil Trigger" was pretty good, but then the game immediately shifts to the that mix of Hard Rock/Industrial you have combat moments and droning demonic ambiance for the exploration moments. Its pretty standard DMC fanfare. So far none of the OSTs have really captures that stellar magic of the first game, but its still pretty good. I'd throw it on in the background while I'm working.

Nico, is a fucking bizarre character. She annoys the hell out of me, and I kind of love her? She basically functions as your portable store for upgrades, saving, and getting Nero new robot arms to use. She's a wild child, but she talks with this nasally stuffiness that I'm not quite sure is supposed to be an nerdy accent or an inflection. She's a goofball, she's foul mouthed, and fearless. I think what makes me love her is compared to her concept art, they actually toned her down to be less sexually designed. She still is, but her looks seem more natural and realistic compared to the picturesque Lady and Trish, which honestly makes her look more appealing.

She's a ridiculous goof, and annoying as all hell. But I'll be damned if their isn't something charming about her.

My biggest complaint with this installment is the same one I had with the DmC: Reboot: The level design sucks. Sorry, ok yeah big demon castle and sprawling gooey walls and scary looking caves are fine and all. But does nobody remember that the first DMC game was kinda like Resident Evil? After the start of the story you would be dropped into a giant castle that you had to explore, fight, and find keys to advance. What has since happened is Final Fantasy 13 syndrome, where the level design feels more or less like a series of straight lines taking you from encounter to encounter. The exploration was part of the game, and I don't know why its shifted away from it.

I hate the Red Queen. One of the most fun aspects of this series is that combat is supposed to be fast, fluid, and exciting. With Dante and V this more or less holds true because you can constantly keep up the pace. But not with Nero, no you have halt your combo to try to get the timing of revving his stupid sword properly to get the best damage out of your combo. I was never able to properly figure it out, and you cant cycle through his robot arms either which is exceptionally annoying. You just have to use them in the order in which you placed them, so you can't adjust them situationally as the fight requires. I do not know why they thought this was a good idea.

Once you get into to a rhythm with the controls, combat is fun regardless of who you are playing with.
Just don't try to rev your stupid sword.

I'm going to spoil a bit of a story bit here so skip this paragraph if you want, but what the fuck was the point of putting Trish and Lady in the game? I'll tell you: To make the pretty girls naked. That's it. You never get to play as either of them, they a pretty much immediately taken out of the equation at the start of the story, and they essentially serve no purpose to advance to the plot. It's frustrating because these two characters are supposed to be sawed off demon hunters themselves. But no, they are relegated to being damsels in distress.

This is the only time I'd be happy for a DLC update because a "Ladies Night mode" would have been awesome since they fight so inherently different than the boys do. But no, Capcom has said they have closed the book on this one so there will be no coming DLC packs for DMC5. They literally put in these two bad ass characters in there to be damsels and stripped naked. Good job, very 2019.

Complaints aside, if not a little ridiculous the story does ultimately come together with a reasonably satisfying ending sequence that feels bad ass to play, if not for leaving open some pretty big plot holes in the conclusion I won't get into for those who having played it. But after hearing it, and then looking it up to learn there is not really a canonical answer for half of it was certainly surprising that they went that way with the story. It's not bad, but it does leave me with some questions I now can't get answered.

I found it very easy to S rank with V, because his bags of tricks lets you stay away from the close combat. 

Bruce Green of FunHaus has a great joke saying that this game was "designed to be cool in 2000". And that probably is one of the most fair opinions I've heard of the game because it certainly does feel like it would be right more at home a generation ago. Despite all my complaints about the game its still an incredibly solid play. I ripped through it and had my fun with it, but ultimately once I finished the game I was done with it. When my only rewards are harder difficulty or arbitrary points, the replability falters. Just another one of the pile of one and done's.

Devil May Cry V came out in march of this year and is already being sold for 20 bucks off of the standard 60 dollar retail. It's a solid play but its not a world beater. It feels like its trying to chase its linage as so many franchised games do. When it comes to spectacle fighters my heart lies with games like Bayonetta, but Devil May Cry V  is more of a return to form than previous iterations, and you could buy worse games for 40 bucks. It gets a lukewarm recommendation.

Seriously, Trish is has a massive ass sword and Lady a bazooka.
But sure, don't let us play as them.