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. >:|