Celeste

[alias_sqbr]

flamebyrd has been enthusing about the plotty puzzle platformer Celeste for some time. The fact that this involved screenshots of death counts in the THOUSANDS rather put me off, but she reassured me that it has a lot of accessibility features to make it easier to play and that I might like the plot of self discovery and dealing with mental illness.

So when it was free on the Epic Store I gave it a shot. And the accessibility features did help a lot! I went from dying in the tutorial level, to making it several screens into Level 1!

And then I gave up. I was still finding it theoretically playable, which is a lot better than I do in most platformers, but having to focus so hard on the right key combinations was stressing me out and Not Fun. If it was like...that much easier again, I might have enjoyed it? But maybe platformers are just not for me. If you're someone who likes platformers in principle but finds them slightly too difficult, you'll probably have a good time.

Anyway, I still liked the characters/aesthetic etc, and today got around to watching a Let's Play. Some of those later levels look GRUELLING, even if I imagine playing with all the accessibility features turned on, so I'm glad I stopped. But it's a really lovely story, and while I skimmed through most of the gameplay (dialogue has very distinctive black boxes that are easy to spot on the youtube timeline) every now and then I'd just stop and watch for the sheer prettiness of it, and enjoy how the gameplay/sprites/music etc all worked together.

Here's flambyrd's post about the themes, and my reactions were broadly similar.

I'm still figuring out how I feel about the way mental illness was handled, the metaphor didn't entirely work for me but still resonated and some of the imagery was really powerful.

Also not sure I how I feel about what seemed to be like...Tribal/Scary Pagan Imagery in some parts, especially considering the game is explicitly set in Canada. But I know basically nothing about Canadian First Nations people or how they'd feel about it.

The creator has recently come out as non binary, and there's hints that the heroine may be a trans woman. The story doesn't explicitly explore gender, but it's enjoyably free of gender essentialism etc.

Finally: I ship Madeline/Badeline like burning. I KNOW IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE AND I DON'T CARE.