Celeste Review

Celeste is a pixel-art 2D platformer of the brutal-but-fair kind popularised by the likes of Super Meat Boy. It takes the Amazon approach to videogame design: fail fast, fail often. You will die potentially thousands of times as you guide Madeline, a depressed young woman, up the titular mountain on a journey that’s as much self-discovery as a physical task.

Madeline can jump, dash and grip -- and that’s it. Keeping the control simple and intuitive allows developer Matt Makes Games to build what are essentially a series of increasingly fiendish puzzles. To conquer the mountain you’ll have to demonstrate problem-solving and planning as well as dexterity. Madeline’s limited grip keeps you from clinging to a ledge to plan your next moves, while a mid-air dash can only be used once between landing, demanding judicious usage. Floating crystals recharge both grip and dash; levels will ask you to chain dozens of precisely timed grips and dashes before Madeline feels firm ground beneath her feet again.

Death is also a crucial part of the Celeste experience. Madeline has no healthbar as such, and dies instantly when she touches an environmental hazard or falls off the map. The high level of precision needed to traverse Celeste Mountain means Madeline will die often. I burned through probably a hundred lives on certain areas, slowly identifying the right strategy. Thankfully, Madeline respawns almost instantly, ready to go again. There’s no fuss when Madeline croaks, like in Super Mario Bros for instance, no Try Again? button to press. Put it this way: if respawing took two seconds instead of one, Celeste could take a whole hour longer to complete. It’s great to play a game where the developers have focused so tightly on small but key gameplay features.

A typical room [Source: Torrents Games]

Your journey to the top of Celeste Mountain takes in eight different levels, from the city at the mountain’s foot, a spooky hotel, and some windswept, exposed mountain. Each level introduces a new mechanic to get to grips with. These range from the esoteric, such as the gelatinous oblongs that propagate your dash through and out the other side; to the more realistic, like mechanical trolleys that throw you across the screen or the strong winds that push and pull you in the exposed mountain level. Perhaps the cleverest are the blocks whose movement is linked to your dash, creating some tough predictive thinking puzzles. There’s a leap of faith element to it, dashing into previously empty space into which a block has suddenly arrived for you to grab onto.

Such elements ensure that Celeste always feels fresh and challenging in new ways. Level length is well judged -- over the course of a level you’ll master a mechanic and then move on to the next. Optional strawberries are dotted around levels, either on the main path or tucked away in hidden areas, representing extra-difficult routes. While rewarding to collect in their own right, the strawberries have a secondary function of allowing the player to expand playtime as they wish. This is doubly important given the repetition inherent in the game design and it’s easy to imagine a lesser developer getting this wrong and allowing it to slip into tedium. There were times when I was trying for a strawberry route and after a number of failures could feel my motivation slipping; I simply walked away from that challenge, no bother. That’s the story of Celeste in a nutshell: smart, invisible design decisions that combine for a special experience. (My one issue with the strawberries is that you’re told at the start they’re strictly for fun only -- but that’s not quite true. Madeline bakes a pie in the end cutscene, and the pie is better the more strawberries you collect (mine sucked). I was oddly annoyed by that.)

Madeline herself is an unusual videogame protagonist. She’s anxious, introverted, and depressed, and the plot of Celeste sees her struggling with her mental health. Some of Celeste’s best moments come when her anxieties take physical manifestations on screen. In a really effective sequence, a broken gondola triggers an anxiety attack, at which point you calm Madeline’s breathing by controlling the fluttering of a feather. The sound reduces in intensity and everything except the feather fades to black.

Celeste’s antagonist is Madeline’s alter-ego, a purple incarnation who appears at various points. Early on, she mimics your path around the level and kills Madeline if you allow her to be caught; later, she takes a more tentacle-like being in a boss-like encounter, firing lasers and other projectiles at you. In the spooky hotel, Madeline insists on helping the proprietor, Mr. Oshiro, despite him trying to trap her in the hotel; she only escapes when her less self-sacrificing alter ego intervenes. It’s a nicely written bit of metaphor. 

While I welcome attempts to write new kinds of protagonist, I unfortunately didn’t warm to Madeline at all. Madeline is stroppy, prickly, humourless and self-absorbed. It gets especially bad towards the game’s latter stages when she has some tediously sincere conversations about her mental health. Anxious and depressed people can often be paradoxically fun and vivacious so I feel there was room to make her more likeable. I found I had no reason to believe in the essential goodness that the game wishes you to see in her, and thus couldn’t particularly root for her. I also didn’t like the hand-drawn cartoon versions of her that appear in cut-scenes, which remind me of bad Flash-era Newgrounds platformers, and even her name set bad-naming bells ringing (I changed it to Mads). Celeste’s side characters aren’t much better. You encounter another climber, Theo, who appears regularly on your climb. Theo is a Seattleite who landed his dream job but cracked under pressure and speaks in the same annoying kind of way Madeline does. His calling card is taking selfies with Madeline without asking. 

Not super into this aesthetic

But that’s really the only negative. Other things worth mentioning are the soundtrack, which is rich, dynamic, and all-too catchy. And I’ve only lightly touched on just how much extra content there is. Besides the strawberries, which are a whole challenge unto themselves, there are also B-Sides to collect, which unlock ultra-difficult versions of the main levels and introduce advanced techniques. I took about 10 hours to complete the main story, but the collectibles could easily double that or more. And, satisfyingly, I still have the motivation to jump back in (comparing favourably to last week’s Okami, which I haven’t been back to).

In sum, then, industry-leading design choices in terms of movement, pacing, and level-design make Celeste a clear standout in its genre.  

NOTE: 08/02/2021

1) Subsequent to this review I continued with the optional extras...and my total play time ballooned from nine hours to fifty-five-plus. And I still haven't completed it. I mentioned B-Sides, but there are also C-Sides and even (I believe) D-Sides, making it clear that the main story should be regarded as only a small part of Celeste.

In addition, there is the whole Farewell DLC package (bundled with the Switch version), which is longer and harder than the actual main game. In Farewell the difficulty is cranked to insane levels, such that it represents a switch of audience focus from relatively casual gamers to hardcore Celeste fans with an almost-limitless desire for punishment. While I welcome the extended challenge, Farewell is a bit much. Yes, Celeste does boast extensive accessibility options, and yes, the game does take great pains to assure you that toggling said options by no means counts as failure...but as a fully able-bodied person who has persevered though countless brutal challenges, enabling accessibility options to me would feel like throwing in the towel.

It was tedium more than frustration that got the better of me eventually: About 3/4 of the way through Farewell I found I lacked the energy to tackle yet another mammoth level. I couldn't get back into the required determined, analytic mindset. Naturally, I then moved onto a much more forgiving, casual gaming experience -- Dark Souls.

2) Not long after publishing this review, Matt of Matt Makes Games came out as a transwoman and changed name to Maddy. She also announced that Madeline is also cannonically trans. You know, I think I knew all along. What vibe was I detecting? Not sure. The announcement also means that Madeline is much closer to a direct representation of Maddy herself, making me feel a bit weird about my criticism of Madeline's character. But, I stand by it.