Thoughts on Celeste

…Yet here we are.

I was adamant on not playing Celeste for a while. It’s a platformer, a hit indie darling, and an actual instance of “this game is a metaphor for depression”. Far from a list of things that gets me excited. Yet avoiding everything that isn’t immediately appealing leads to sulking at home, and that’s no fun. With a long summer vacation ahead, it was time to put on mountaineering boots.

“Happiness is reality minus expectations”
- that’s what they say, right?

As I previously experienced with INMOST and more unfortunately in The Forgotten City, your expectations do indeed heavily affect your enjoyment of the game – for better or for worse. With Celeste, approaching it as “fine, I’ll see what the fuss is about” definitely played to it’s strength, because despite some gripes, it’s a fun game. Not my favourite gameplay, not the best story, and far from the most breathtaking art, but it’s fun.

The controls are really good! Not control buttons, mind you. I was so baffled by the arrows with c/x or whatever it presents by default instead of WASD+space like a sane video-game that I switched to controller right away. Remember, no nuance allowed. There are still some problems even there, for instance I still can’t understand how others use the D-pad for movement, and with the sticks you have to be super careful to dash in right direction, something I still struggled with a dozen hours into the game.

But I started the previous paragraph with praise, let’s get back to that. I recall mentioning how tight and instant the controls felt in my Hollow Knight review. Here, it’s different – they are floaty, but in a good way. The game appears to cheat a bit in your favour, and I don’t just mean coyote time. It’s extremely smooth and fluid. Jump into dash into a bubble into another dash, I was inclined to go fast just because it felt awesome.

The pixel art you spend most of your time with is neat in a utilitarian way. It’s simplistic for the sake of superb readability – you’re unlikely to be blown away by it, but neither will you die to confusing sprites. However, what I am torn on is that instead of a single, consistent art style the game has multiple. I counted distinct ones for gameplay, dialogue portraits, end-of-level drawings, and main menu, with a few more odd single visual elements. You get everything from pixels to cartoonish to low-poly 3d. Now, are the styles best fits for their respective elements? Maybe? The menu is done in a way that lends itself well to 3d, and pixel portraits would’ve probably required mixels to look decent. But then again, that’s because we look at the chosen approach – the game could probably have been designed just as well around a more consistent style. Apparently there were two different artists for this game, perhaps they both played to their strengths.

The story… exists. There is definitely one and there is no question about it. However, I was surprised by how bare bones it was. It’s not that I expected a masterpiece of storytelling from “depression is like climbing a mountain: the game”, but it was still a surprise there really wasn’t that much to it. You have a panic attack – breath in and out! When things get better – they get worse before they get better again! You need to talk to the bad parts of yourself to move forward!!! It feels iffy to be negative about somebody’s interpretation of something like this. But I don’t think anything was said or shown that would make me believe Celeste has a “good story”. The highlights were one meta-ish element that made me go “oh, that’s clever” and the following quote I’ll provide without context:

“Drinking, mostly. And getting mad at people on the internet.”

Something I really liked is how non-punishing the experience was. At least for the most part, more on that below. This game sure is serious about mental health – that is, about keeping the player sane. Dying rarely sends you back more than 30 seconds, and there is no penalty for it. A lot of the harder rooms are straight up completely optional, only giving you “strawberries”, Celeste’s main collectibles.

However, this is also something that becomes frustrating later, once you happily finish the main hike and get to various advanced parts of the game. The further you go, the longer “rooms” become. What could obviously be two obstacles becomes one; some hard jumps are repeated just to make you spend more time. Why? Strawberries given out for optional rooms are a great mechanic because people who care can take the time to complete them, while the rest who merely want to have fun with a game may continue onwards. Similarly, people interested in completing audacious trials without a single mistake could keep doing it without the game enforcing the rules. Why do the rest of us have to partake in it? To gain a sense of pride and accomplishment as we finally finish the game’s last chapter?

This criticism further extends to “checkpoints”. Whenever you feel like you had enough and need take break, you can only return to a few pre-defined points in the level. This leads to annoying situations where you want to leave, but doing so would discard lots of time, so you just keep bashing your head against a room instead of going away and returning with fresh enthusiasm later. Worse yet, the game offers auto-saves for exiting which bring you back to the exact spot you were on! Why couldn’t quitting to the menu and having a go at another level work the same?

Despite my prejudice, Celeste gave me seventeen hours of fun, which is what games are fundamentally about. And I’m not certain I won’t one day return to tackle the rest it has to offer. This counts as “mission accomplished”, right?