About Celeste
Mar. 27th, 2018 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quandary_lionsSo this game's become a very big part of our life recently. We'll talk more in-depth about why and the pluralesque story stuff in it later, but for now, we'll paste our general overview of it for some context.
Huge wall of text beneath the cut.
"A game about climbing a mountain."
This game... it's of a genre that we normally avoid entirely, yet it's become one of our top faves AND a game that we've begun learning to speedrun. Where to begin?
Celeste is an indie game that came out relatively recently, near the end of January. It's a difficult precision platformer, where mistimed or misplaced inputs will quickly send you hurtling to your death--and you WILL die, a lot.
Sounds demoralizing? In Celeste, it isn't.
- The game does not mock you for dying. Ever. If anything, it does the opposite. One of the chapter loading screens outright says that your death count is something to be proud of, as every death means you've learned something.
- Death feels fair. Whenever we've died, we knew exactly why--we didn't hold our jump long enough, we dashed too early, we jumped at the wrong time off the moving platform, etc. Nothing is random, and the controls are precise and solid. We've never felt like a death was out of our control or caused by anything other than our own mistakes.
- Death feels seamless. The developers stated that they wanted to make deaths as quick and painless for the player as possible, and it shows. When you die, you respawn almost immediately--there are no loading screens to wait through. Instead of being placed at a checkpoint several rooms back, you're placed at the entrance of the room that you died on (and yes, you have infinite lives). If the room contains cycling platforms and other timing-based elements, they're reset so you don't have to wait for them to line back up, you can get moving again right away.
- Death actually is a learning experience. Every time we've died and retried, we could actually feel ourselves getting better at the game, to the point that we stopped having any doubts that we could play the game. We knew that if we kept trying, we definitely would learn, and we definitely would learn enough to succeed. That's a rare feeling! And one that's been incredibly soothing for those of us who tend to get paralyzed by the idea of failure.
- The game is bite-size friendly. At any time, you can save and quit out of the game, and when you reload it, the game will return you to the same room that you left off at. No needing to redo levels. If the game ever got too intense for us, we felt free to put it down and work on something else.
All of this means that death feels like a natural part of the game--failure isn't a failure, isn't something to be ashamed of, but a normal part of learning. This game is equal parts "holy crap, I can't possibly do this," "holy crap, I'm doing this," and "HOLY CRAP, I DID THAT?!?!" There's multiple places we thought we couldn't possibly clear when we saw others play the game, and yet, we did--and it's really something else to come back to those spots, breeze through them, and marvel at how far we've come.
And if the game is still too daunting, or is otherwise too much in its base form, it comes with:
- Assist Mode. It's more than a flat "easy mode"--Assist Mode lets you customize the game in all sorts of ways, from increasing the number of the times you can dash mid-air, to giving yourself infinite stamina when climbing walls, to slowing down the speed of the game, to total invulnerability. All you get for using it is a small stamp on your save file that marks that Assist Mode is in use. You aren't locked out of any parts of the game or story by playing with Assist Mode on, and true to form, the game never mocks you for using it.
And holy crap, it has a good story. A very good story. We don't want to spoil anything, but it's a very sincere and real story with some of the most thoughtful treatments of mental illness that we've seen in games. A story good enough that, after watching it in an LP, we were compelled to buy the game itself even if we couldn't play it. (Turned out, we could. :P)
So, enough of our rambling. Here's some links. It's available on PC/Mac/Linux, PS4, Xbox One, and Switch. (From what we've heard, desktop and Switch are the top contenders--desktop for more control options and Switch for portability.)
Official Site
Steam Store Page
AMA by the devs
OST (it's real good)
tl;dr Celeste is a very good game, please consider playing it even if platformers aren't your thing.
Huge wall of text beneath the cut.
"A game about climbing a mountain."
This game... it's of a genre that we normally avoid entirely, yet it's become one of our top faves AND a game that we've begun learning to speedrun. Where to begin?
Celeste is an indie game that came out relatively recently, near the end of January. It's a difficult precision platformer, where mistimed or misplaced inputs will quickly send you hurtling to your death--and you WILL die, a lot.
Sounds demoralizing? In Celeste, it isn't.
- The game does not mock you for dying. Ever. If anything, it does the opposite. One of the chapter loading screens outright says that your death count is something to be proud of, as every death means you've learned something.
- Death feels fair. Whenever we've died, we knew exactly why--we didn't hold our jump long enough, we dashed too early, we jumped at the wrong time off the moving platform, etc. Nothing is random, and the controls are precise and solid. We've never felt like a death was out of our control or caused by anything other than our own mistakes.
- Death feels seamless. The developers stated that they wanted to make deaths as quick and painless for the player as possible, and it shows. When you die, you respawn almost immediately--there are no loading screens to wait through. Instead of being placed at a checkpoint several rooms back, you're placed at the entrance of the room that you died on (and yes, you have infinite lives). If the room contains cycling platforms and other timing-based elements, they're reset so you don't have to wait for them to line back up, you can get moving again right away.
- Death actually is a learning experience. Every time we've died and retried, we could actually feel ourselves getting better at the game, to the point that we stopped having any doubts that we could play the game. We knew that if we kept trying, we definitely would learn, and we definitely would learn enough to succeed. That's a rare feeling! And one that's been incredibly soothing for those of us who tend to get paralyzed by the idea of failure.
- The game is bite-size friendly. At any time, you can save and quit out of the game, and when you reload it, the game will return you to the same room that you left off at. No needing to redo levels. If the game ever got too intense for us, we felt free to put it down and work on something else.
All of this means that death feels like a natural part of the game--failure isn't a failure, isn't something to be ashamed of, but a normal part of learning. This game is equal parts "holy crap, I can't possibly do this," "holy crap, I'm doing this," and "HOLY CRAP, I DID THAT?!?!" There's multiple places we thought we couldn't possibly clear when we saw others play the game, and yet, we did--and it's really something else to come back to those spots, breeze through them, and marvel at how far we've come.
And if the game is still too daunting, or is otherwise too much in its base form, it comes with:
- Assist Mode. It's more than a flat "easy mode"--Assist Mode lets you customize the game in all sorts of ways, from increasing the number of the times you can dash mid-air, to giving yourself infinite stamina when climbing walls, to slowing down the speed of the game, to total invulnerability. All you get for using it is a small stamp on your save file that marks that Assist Mode is in use. You aren't locked out of any parts of the game or story by playing with Assist Mode on, and true to form, the game never mocks you for using it.
And holy crap, it has a good story. A very good story. We don't want to spoil anything, but it's a very sincere and real story with some of the most thoughtful treatments of mental illness that we've seen in games. A story good enough that, after watching it in an LP, we were compelled to buy the game itself even if we couldn't play it. (Turned out, we could. :P)
So, enough of our rambling. Here's some links. It's available on PC/Mac/Linux, PS4, Xbox One, and Switch. (From what we've heard, desktop and Switch are the top contenders--desktop for more control options and Switch for portability.)
Official Site
Steam Store Page
AMA by the devs
OST (it's real good)
tl;dr Celeste is a very good game, please consider playing it even if platformers aren't your thing.
