Celeste (Xbox One)

While most games certainly want you to finish them, the precision platformer Celeste tries to make sure you do. It doesn’t do so through something as basic as making you feel guilty if you don’t finish it, instead providing you everything you need to get there and lining your motivation up with the game’s heroine.

 

While you can name your character whatever you like, the girl known by default as Madeline has committed herself to climbing Mount Celeste, a task that is far more formidable than tackling its real life counterpart in Canada thanks to the strange supernatural phenomena that effects those who climb it. Madeline doesn’t know about this aspect going in though, simply trying to commit to the task to try and overcome her natural inclinations to give up and freeze up when the going gets rough. Scaling a mountain is a fairly simple metaphor for overcoming adversity, but Madeline’s personal struggle with her anxiety, self-doubt, and depression are able to manifest not just through the game’s difficulty making such trials appropriately hard, but through concrete moments where Madeline speaks with other characters like fellow climber Theo and a dark reflection of herself the mountain manifests. Madeline isn’t wallowing in despair or anything either, able to have amusing conversations with others and even reaching out to help them despite dealing with her own issues at the same time, and some adorable yet expressive character portraits during dialogue help to really cement her personality as someone who can be a bit grouchy and sassy despite overall being friendly and kind. Even more impressively, when characters speak in Celeste their voice is represented as simple repeated sound samples, but Madeline has different pitches that help to give a comment an amusing grumpy sting or a truly heart-wrenching sense of vulnerability and panic.

Madeline must face that part of her that embodies her misgivings and fears, grappling with the way it can literally manifest as a hindrance as this mountain turns metaphor into reality. While the messages, stumbles, and triumphs are certainly meant to be relatable to those who experience similar problems in real life, Celeste’s gameplay also slips into the equation rather excellently as well. Celeste is a precision platformer where you don’t exactly have many abilities but they must be used expertly to clear screen after screen of difficult challenges. Beyond a jump and the ability to climb walls as long as you have the stamina for it, your only real tool for overcoming the hostile environments of Mount Celeste is a dash. This can be aimed in any direction and is most useful for helping you get additional distance in the air, almost every area you encounter necessitating the correct use of dashing in some form to clear it. You only get one use of a dash until your feet touch solid ground again though, meaning picking the right moment to make that dash or identifying where you can land for a quick dash refill ends up the primary consideration you’ll be making no matter what gimmicks start getting added along the way. Madeline will die the moment she touches a hazard or falls off screen, but you will always respawn and most areas in Celeste are designed well so there is one clear challenge or a set of small ones rather than there being too many grueling gauntlets that would force you replay large sections.

 

That ability to always immediately come back to life right near where you perished embodies that spirit of continuously pushing forward despite the difficult task ahead of you. Many challenges in Celeste require spot on timing and dash aim if you want to clear them, and admittedly even good spacing on how long you go between checkpoints won’t fully alleviate the frustration you might experience retrying a particularly tough one over and over again. Many of Celeste’s trials take the form of rooms you can mentally figure out in an instant once you’ve become acquainted with Madeline’s abilities, after which it becomes a matter of just executing it perfectly. The windows are tight but your options are often not too broad, meaning while being a little off in your control stick positioning can make a dash miss its mark or you might find yourself missing your intended destination if you waited a half second too long to make your move, you’re at least usually trying to do the right thing rather than needing to experiment and find a solution. This isn’t universally true, particularly when it comes to the entirely optional strawberries found along the adventure that do require a bit more problem solving to grab. There is no material reward and only a few associated achievements tied to strawberry collection, but they can often inject a compelling new goal in rooms where they are a secondary objective or they can have their own dedicated screens where you might need to work a little harder to find out how to grab it since you must land safely after grabbing one to claim it.

Celeste has many secrets, not only just hidden strawberries but cassette tapes that unlock more difficult versions of the game’s 8 chapters, crystal hearts that go towards unlocking additional chapters, and some trials for truly dedicated players like Golden Strawberries that require the player to carry them all the way to the end of a chapter without dying. Celeste thankfully offers a satisfying cohesive narrative independent of any collection requirements and most of the optional activities seem designed only for the most dedicated of players who can handle even more stringent demands than the already strict normal game, but there is also a mitigating factor built into Celeste’s option menu for those who might find even the default challenge level daunting. Assistance exists in the form of some options a player can toggle if they need a little assistance in climbing the mountain, and rather than this seeming to counteract the message of determination in tackling the challenge of tackling Celeste, it fits fairly well with moments where cooperation and assistance are highlighted in interactions with other characters. You can make it so Madeline never runs out of stamina so she can cling to walls indefinitely, you can give her an extra air dash or even set it so she can dash as many times as you want without running out, and you can even activate invincibility. A mark will be placed on your profile for doing so, but otherwise you can clear the game as you like, figuring out what degree of difficulty matches what you want out of Celeste.

 

Celeste’s difficulty thankfully comes with a good set of new mechanics along the adventure so it’s not all just dashing around to avoid spikes. Crystals floating in the air are introduced that refill your dash power, giving you something to aim for if you need to stay airborne longer. Bubbles can be used to launch you about at high speed, there are blocks you can ride and alter their paths with directional presses, and unusual glittering rectangles can be dashed through to get you to the other side. A concept or two does feel weak like the sluggish section where you fight against strong winds, but some ideas can truly get your heart racing like when you are pursued by a set of shadows deadly to the touch that repeat your every move. With your actions already needing to be quite precise, these shadows makes you start to consider your movement more deeply than usual so you don’t accidentally overlap your path with them and perish. Dangers like dark goop that can fly or move about add moving hazards that introduce an even greater focus on timing, and while the snowy mountain setting seems like it could get old fast, the supernatural nature of Mount Celeste leads to areas like a haunted hotel and ethereal ruins ensuring both setting diversity and a new stint with mechanics that are often mostly just found there.

 

A lot of the ideas put forward can be learned fairly quickly without the game having to explain them as well, nice touches like Madeline’s hair going from red to blue showing her dash has been used up easy to read in the game’s pixelated art style. The music can certainly be lovely at times or foreboding and atmospheric at others, but at the same time it also can get in on urging the player to keep trying to conquer the mountain, some musical tracks getting additional instrumentation as you get deeper into the level while moments near the end start to increase their energy as a marker of your journey’s impending end. Some chapters can feel a bit long, especially if you’re attempting to grab every strawberry and secret you can, but new rooms do often feel built with clear concepts that help differentiate every trial you tackle, the imaginative design not really hitting a rut and perseverance and skillful execution being what will carry you forward rather than any difficult puzzle solving or luck-based elements.

THE VERDICT: Celeste’s heartfelt story of perseverance ties marvelously to the same sensation the player will feel as they die again and again to a difficult challenge. Victory is attainable and within reach, the player given the room and tools needed to try it until they’ve overcome it no matter what imaginative dangers or well-conceived layouts stand in their way. This precision platformer can sometimes feel like it leans a bit hard on testing your ability to execute things properly even outside the deviously demanding extra content, but it still paves a path through its main campaign that is satisfying to overcome, achievable despite its difficulty, and still finds ways to offer more engaging tests of your skill along the way should you poke around areas for their secrets and strawberry challenges.

 

And so, I give Celeste for Xbox One…

A GREAT rating. Celeste is going to primarily be a test of your ability to aim and time its midair dash properly, but thankfully there is a wealth of ideas for how a room can put that skill through its paces. New gimmicks are explored in a variety of ways so their presence results in meaningful shake-ups for the chapter, and with strawberries being fully optional, you are free to gauge if the unique rooms they present are within reach for you. The mild puzzles sometimes tied to grabbing a strawberry do feel like a solid way to make the platforming in a specific area feel more memorable and engaging and Celeste’s main journey does make sure its core journey has some situations that demand a good eye for how to move rather than a course forward that is immediately apparent. Making you think a bit more about what to do more often could help to space out the moments of demanding precise movement as well, because while clearing an obstacle course with pinpoint precision is satisfying, so is realizing the way to get around a trial that was stumping you before. Celeste’s extra content can go a bit overboard in how demanding it is though, but there is very little wrong with the primary quest of reaching the mountaintop. Madeline ends up an enjoyable protagonist because of her emotional range so she’s not defined just by the dramatic moments where her anxiety flares up, and the small supporting cast feel like they draw out her personality enough that you root for her and yourself to make it to Mount Celeste’s peak.

 

You might get frustrated on the way to beating Celeste, but the game is not cruelly trying to stoke such anger nor is it aiming to keep satisfaction away from you. You can reach the top, either by accepting the help that’s a menu away or persisting and accepting the failures as part of the process. It might not fully be able to quiet that doubt you may have when a particularly difficult room asks for you to dash in an unflinchingly exact manner, but it also tries to make sure you’re never too far away from a small victory. Madeline stumbles in her journey as well and overlooking moments of weakness and failure isn’t really the message of her growing understanding of her self-doubt either. Persevere with Celeste despite whatever losses you experience along the way and the satisfaction of completing a great game will feel like a fitting reward.