But one thing I know for sure is that I’m not the target masocore audience - I just don’t feel the type of compulsion and satisfaction they are supposed to elicit. I’m one of those weirdos that think Super Meat Boy is a pretty bad game, I never really enjoyed any of the Mario romhacks I’ve tried, and I don’t even enjoy watching playthroughs of I Wanna Be The Guy-likes, let alone playing any. And part of what makes Celeste so great is that despite the superficial similarities, it’s nothing like those games.
Most crucially, Celeste is a title that nails probably the most important thing in design as far as I’m concerned, which is the feel. Character reacts to controller inputs almost instantly, the acceleration and deceleration are kept to minimum, jump arcs are satisfying and intuitive. It just seems so simple - the more control you have over the character, the better it feels. I don’t know anyone who enjoys having to build up the speed while moving, or the slide before coming to the full stop, or dealing with vague inertia of the jump, and yet that’s the standard that platforming genre has accustomed us to. And as far as my Internet bubble goes, people’s minds were blown away when seeing how well a game like Celeste controls, largely thanks to getting rid of those hindrances - I sure wish we could make this the standard.
Admittedly Celeste goes way beyond nailing down the fundamentals. It also offers great climbing and walljumping, pristine airdashes, plenty of interesting movements caused by interacting with obstacles and pickups, and then there’s an entire layer to preserving and using momentum by chaining different movements together, inspired by speedrunning communities and Smash Bros. Melee’s wavedashing. The tempo, responsiveness, use of screenshaking, flashing lights and character animation all together molded Madeline into one of my favorite characters to control of all time. Then there’s subtle aids - player can still jump for a few frames after they run off the platform, accounting for the frustration caused by pressing it just miliseconds too late, and hitboxes are often more generous than they seem when detecting collision with objects we want to touch and avoiding the ones that damage us. I’m not sure how much inspiration Matt Thorson and his crew took from Smash, how much from anime fighting games, how much from traditional platformers and how much they figured out on their own after making Towerfall, but the results show an absolute mastery of knowing how to make movement in the 2D space enjoyable.
But as Steve Swink once pointed out it, without the context of the world that the character can navigate and interact with, there’s no meaning to the mechanics, which gets me to discussing Celeste’s levels. To cut it short, they nail down pretty much every aspect of design. They use all the good practices dating back to first Super Mario Bros. in terms of introducing new concepts to the player in very simple, isolated, and restrictive environments, to make it obvious what is it that the player is supposed to do. Then they further explore them to give player some ideas about various interactions and combinations that are possible, and finally construct demanding challenges that test player’s dexterity and observation skills. Like the masocore games, bulk of the levels are very short, often completable in just few seconds once you know what you’re doing. However, they are strung together by larger themes that make each "world" unique - ruins of an abandoned city have us progressively leaving civilization and going into the unknown as the player gets accustomed to the game rules and stars getting challenged, a haunted hotel puts us in an uneasy state and asks us to question the game’s rules just a little, and a temple triggers a dream-like state, recontextualizing itself in a very oniric logic. Even less-distinct chapters of the our journey to the top of Mount Celeste each have some visual and gameplay motifs that tie individual rooms together and differentiate it from the rest of the game. There’s definitely a narrative flow here, our efforts in playing this game are properly transposed over Madeline’s journey.
Moreover, there are many secrets to be found, some of them requiring purely explorational chops, such as noticing a crack in a wall, or a shelf that stands out from others, but then there are puzzles to be solved and unconventional rules to be figured out. Most reward the player with a strawberry, and the same type of collectible is also often put in plain sight somewhere on the level, but in a place that is harder to reach than the exit, to give players who want additional challenge a pointer saying “here it is”. Speaking of which, after we finish the game, we are rewarded with two sets of additional, harder levels for each chapter and “beat the entire episode without dying even once” golden strawberry challenge. I really applaud developers for tiering the difficulty like this - main story is something that every abled player should be able to beat in a reasonable timeframe if they want to and put in time and effort, B-Sides enter the realm where certain level of dexterity and determination is necessary, and C-Sides, bonus challenges and the 9th DLC world slowly enter that masocore realm which, quite frankly, has overwhelmed me half-way through and I’m not sure if I’ll ever return.
The thing that is important to mention about the base levels is that despite appearances, high controller precision isn’t necessarily the most crucial thing in going through them. Sure, I’m not saying it’s a cakewalk. But as I was playing the game, whenever I felt like the timing on a particular jump is too strict and I just can’t get it right after trying over and over, I would realize that I’m actually not supposed to take that jump, but simply do something different - airdash in a different direction, for example straight up instead of diagonal, or land somewhere and recharge energy, or grab the wall from the other side, and once I do that the challenge becomes trivial. Moments like this make you realize that even the most action dexterous games can often be broken down into puzzles, where you consider the level layout, your moves, and terrain properties, and have to figure out the only possible way to go through.
Getting away from the core gameplay, there’s a couple more features worth talking about. I’ve talked about narrative contextualization of climbing the mountain using precise platforming mechanics with the character’s journey, but there’s a bit more to the game’s story, with traditional cutscenes on one hand, Madeline’s doppelganger (a manifestation of her fears and doubts) fulfilling several different gameplay functions on the other, and finally the motif of feathers, which is first introduced in a simple minigame about a breathing technique, and later becomes one of the helpful pickups that we encounter across the levels. Overall game’s story is pretty open-ended, leaving plenty of room for the player to fill in the blanks with their own thoughts and experiences on going through hardships and trying to get better, and the highs and lows that come with it. This is enhanced by the game’s gorgeous pixelart which can feel ethereal at times, mostly cold color palette with lots of blues and purple and beautiful effects animation. But the real star is Lena Raine’s score, which perfectly accentuates the emotions player feels in any given moment, and is also just full of incredible bangers, some of which got even more bangier in their remixed versions used for the B-Sides.
There is one last important thing to talk about, and that is the game’s assist mode. As I’m not a souls’ player, I thankfully missed out on the discourse around difficulty levels spurned by Sekiro which, uh, didn’t look very fun reading from the outside. In any case, I think Celeste gets this just so, so right - I’ve mentioned that I think every abled gamer should be able to complete the main story in a reasonable timeframe, but what about the people with disabilities? What about those who never played any video game before and don’t really have time to patiently get good at platforming, but want to experience Celeste’s art or story? That’s where the Assist Mode comes in - it allows you to set the difficulty yourself. Reduce the game speed, remove limitations on stamina and number of airdashes, make yourself invincible. The developer is not taking responsibility for not matching you difficulty expectations by arbitrarily setting different difficulty curves for Easy/Medium/Hard, they designed the levels for what they thought would make a fun, engaging game, but they are giving you the tools to match the challenge to your abilities however you wish. I firmly believe that this should be the standard in the industry.
There’s a lot I respect about Celeste, but the reason I truly love it firmly lies in the controls. Running, jumping, wallbouncing and airdashing, stringing moves into quick, complex sequences to near miss every obstacle on the course and land on your feet at the finish line is one of the most incredible feelings that video games give me. I like the music, I like the art, I respect the story and the minutiae of game design. But what I love is that feeling of moving around. Not all the games on this list are my favorite in their given genre of all time. Celeste is my favorite 2D platformer period.
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