Celeste – Nintendo Switch

The ambitious 2D platformer, Celeste, touches the hearts of players, telling a wonderfully sincere story, while engaging them with creative level design, buttery-smooth gameplay and vividly vibrant visuals.

The Climb to Self-Discovery

From Towerfall creators, Extremely OK Games, Celeste’s story follows an anxiety-ridden young woman, Madeline, who aims to challenge herself by climbing the titular Celeste Mountain. The magically shifting mountain creates many dangers for Madeline, turning mental ones into physical ones like its many deadly spikes. Along her trek, she meets many new faces, including her personified self-doubt named “Badeline”, the antagonist that tries to bring Madeline down and persuade her into giving up.

What makes Celeste’s nuanced themes of mental illness and overcoming self-doubt special is how they are tied into the challenging difficulty of the game, allowing players to identify with Madeline and her inner struggles. It’s easy to become invested in her journey, and people suffering from anxiety are inspired to grow the way she does. Other lovable faces include the happy-go-lucky aspiring photographer, Theo, and the carefree old mountain resident, Granny, both helping Madeline confess her insecurities through funny and heartfelt conversations.

Celeste is also visually stunning, with its beautiful canvas of simple pixel art, providing clarity and visual cues to make its characters easily identifiable (like Madeline’s hair briefly changing colour after you dash). The game’s mesmerising soundtrack completely shapes the atmosphere, mirroring Madeline’s inner thoughts, variously emitting calm, dread, and courage for Madeline and the player alike.

Shoot for the Summit This single player 2D platformer feels amazing to play thanks to the combination of tight controls and fluid, precise movement. As proven by games like Super Meat Boy, sometimes keeping things simple just works. Madeline’s main abilities are wall climbing and a short dash, but the game is built spectacularly around them, and allows you to master them in your own way.

Celeste has excellent level design and mechanics; each stage puts your skills to the test with creative and cleverly placed obstacles in a mix of platforming and puzzle solving. You’ll dash through “Dream Blocks”, float fast in bubbles, or fly after touching a golden feather. Plus, strawberry lovers will delight as there are tons to grab within each stage, found in hard-to-reach places or hidden in plain sight, and some even fly away if you dash just once.

While Celeste is a difficult climb, the steady pacing of the hike keeps the player engaged and its message inspires them to learn from mistakes and eventually make it through. The game further ties into the message by encouraging you to be proud of your death count and only collect the strawberries if you want to. However, if you only want to experience the story, you can always turn on Assist Mode to lower the challenge in any way you want.

The Heart of the Mountain

Reaching the summit is only the tip of the iceberg, because Celeste’s additional content gives tons of incentive to replay memorable stages, going beyond solely beating them faster or potentially discovering easter eggs.

Collecting hidden Cassette Tapes unlocks the super-difficult remixed B-Side Stages that push you even further, and beating those stages unlocks the even tougher C-Side Stages, some of which even require you to pull off movement-based tricks you never knew you could do. Your reward for these challenges is Crystal Hearts, which are also hidden in the normal stages and importantly act as keys to the expert-level stages. I would only recommend this for climbers really wanting to push themselves up a high grade, especially when preparing for “Farewell”, Celeste’s ultimate challenge.

Conclusion

Within Celeste’s heart lies a beautiful story tackling an important subject manner, bonded with exciting gameplay and gorgeous sights and sounds to provide an unforgettable journey that anyone can enjoy. If you love challenging platformers or relate to Celeste’s compelling themes, now’s your chance to push yourself and start you own mountain-scale journey. You got this.