Flying: Celeste
Sep. 24th, 2018 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeA while ago, a friend gave us a copy of Celeste, a platformer game that's ostensibly about climbing a mountain but really about dealing with your own mind. The rest of the game contains spoilers, so the very short version is: if you are an obsessive platformer like us who takes immense personal satisfaction in getting from Point A to Point B, then this game is for you. It is hard and it is good, and music and visuals are both great. It's worth your money.
The basic story is, you are a girl who decides to climb a mountain. Your life has sunk to such a self-defeating rut that you have to do SOMETHING, so you might as well climb Mt. Celeste. The thing is, there's a reason nobody lives on Mt. Celeste except a batty old lady. The mountain has a habit of making your inner terrors real. The further you go, the more clear it gets that you aren't just fighting a relentlessly difficult mountain; you're also fighting yourself tooth and nail every step of the way, and that just isn't tenable. You can't keep living this way, and the mountain becomes a symbol not just of how unbearable things have gotten, but how they can be transformed.
It is possibly the most Sneak game ever created. It fulfills all the Sneak criteria, and all of them are thematically important:
Death
Though you don't kill anything in Celeste, you yourself will die hundreds, thousands, countless times, and the game will track every one. (Right now we're somewhere around 12,000.) This might seem an act of sadism, but the game explicitly tells you to be proud of your death count: it's proof that you're learning.
In most games, death is a fail state, a punishment for messing up. But in Celeste, death is a teacher. You have infinite lives, save points are generous, and your deaths very quick, a mere pause to figure out what went wrong. You might be stumped as to how to traverse a room, give it your best shot, and die quickly, but the death itself often gives you the clue to success. Then it's just a matter of dying over and over as you fine-tune your strategy.
Your character in Celeste admits that she struggles with anxiety and depression, and paralytic fear of failure is an ongoing theme in the game, to the point that Theo, a new friend you meet while climbing, gets sealed inside an unbreakable crystal prison, stared at by dozens of enormous eyeballs, unable to move. He is completely safe (well, unless you hurl him into a bottomless pit by accident), and can't fail at anything he does... because he can't do anything.
In Celeste (as in real life), you must fail. It is the only way to progress.
Death in video games is such a standby that we never really stop to consider what it means, in the game's own universe. It's just how it works--you screw up, you die. But Celeste subtly acknowledges it. Through the part of the level where you have to bodily carry Theo (crystal prison and all), he speaks to you, mostly to urge you on or remark on a puzzle getting solved. However, at one point he only speaks to you after you've died a few times. "You can do this," he tells you.
Which begs the question: are Theo and your character on some level aware of their deaths? Are they aware of their mistakes, just as you the player are? Theo, at least, seems to be. (At the B-side version of that level, which is optional to play, he asks, "Is this canon?")
In other games, this might just be leaning on the fourth wall, but if Mt. Celeste is entirely devoted to forcing you to confront yourself... what if the mountain itself is what endlessly resurrects you? What if the mountain wants you to learn?
You and Theo are not the only characters dealing with their mortality in the game--so are the other human characters. The batty old lady, the sole surviving resident on the mountain, says she likes living there, that the mountain keeps her sharp and humble. Despite her advanced age, she has no desire to leave the mountain, even though there are no other living residents to help her. She mentions that she's slowing down, at times even struggling... but she seems to have made her peace with it. (And who knows? Maybe she's already died many times and trusts the mountain to do right by her.)
And then you have Mr. Oshiro, the ghostly propietor who owns the (now falling apart) fancy resort hotel. It's never entirely clear how Mr. Oshiro dies; notes in the game show that after the hotel has to be shut down, he can't quite bear to leave, leaving only an unsettling suggestion (for us, at least) that he might've committed suicide so he'd never have to.
Mr. Oshiro is still in the hotel, unable to leave, still desperately trying to pretend everything is fine, even as his anxiety metastasizes into black red-edged blobs that infest the hotel and kill everything on sight. He doesn't even seem to notice the blobs are there; he never acknowledges their existence until the end credits of the game, even though they're the reason he can't bear to clean the hotel. It's like the mountain won't let him go, keeps trying to make him learn, but Mr. Oshiro is so fixed in denial that he can't. And so he's trapped in a collapsing hotel full of his anxieties, a literal shade of who he once was. (Until the end credits, which shows him finally, finally acknowledging his black blobs and putting them to work as he starts finally cleaning his beloved hotel.)
The golden strawberries, which are optional collectibles gotten by beating levels all the way through without dying once, are by far the most frustrating part of the game. They seem oddly counter to the game's overall philosophy and message... but they are completely optional. There is literally NOTHING to be gained from the golden strawberries--no secret areas of the game, no additions to the story. Maybe the game is trying to make a point about how trying to play without mistakes is way, way more difficult and frustrating than just failing and learning. It's almost like the game is asking, "Why are you so determined to get EVERYTHING, even though it's for nothing but bragging rights?"
Easy to Play, Hard to Win
This is the only game that has ever left me going, "I can't believe I did that!" (followed immediately by, "thank god I never have to do it again.")
There are really only a few things you can do in this game. You can walk. You can jump. You can hang on (or climb). And you can dash. That's it. The game takes these very simple building blocks, and builds magnificent architecture out of them.
The control scheme was mostly alien to us at the start, making for a very frustrating beginning. We bungled the most basic procedures, trying to learn the unfamiliar keys. That alone took a couple of days. But then, it seemed almost magic, watching our character dashing and leaping through areas that had seemed teeth-gnashingly difficult just a few hours before. I have never played a game where progress and learning were so visible and noticeable, where you can feel the impossible becoming challenging becoming effortless.
To our surprise, we sometimes improved at the game when emotionally drained. That empty-headedness kept us from psyching ourselves out and overthinking the whole thing. Maddeningly tricky jumps became automatic muscle memory, thoughtless and effortless, which certainly seems relevant for a game about dealing with anxiety. All the conscious thinking and worrying just makes it easier to bungle; this is a game demanding utmost precision, but succeeding at it requires letting go of control. The immensely complicated becomes simple and intuitive.
As I got to the hardest parts, the C-sides of game levels, I found myself mentally telling myself to think light, pretend I was floating, as though that could somehow translate to my character's jumps. Really, I was trying to keep my mind empty. But it seemed to work! And oh, the wonder of everything snapping into focus, where the hardest, most insane jumps suddenly become effortless! The glee at running, jumping, and dashing through areas that even Theo calls "clearly impossible!"
At first, the levels are focused on the earth, but as you climb higher and higher, your character's feet barely touch the ground. She breaks free of her mind like gravity, dashing more and more through the air until she is flying. You are flying.
Creativity
I mentioned that sometimes being exhausted and mindless helped improve our performance in this game. But this is the only platformer we've ever played where we had to sometimes walk away from it and consciously ponder out a puzzle, sometimes for days. (And sometimes, the smallest "why is that there?" confusions led to unlocking it.)
Yes, this is a game where sometimes you have to get out of your own way. But it's also a game where you have to consciously stop, put it down, and go ponder some things out. But all the puzzles felt possible. With the exception of one puzzle that refers to Mario 3, none of them require outside knowledge. If you sit and think about it, and carefully look at everything, eventually you will find out all the game's secrets.
(Except that one Crystal Heart puzzle in the A-side of the Mirror Temple. We NEVER would've figured that one out.)
For a lot of this game, there is more than one way to get almost anywhere. Until things get their absolute hardest and most demanding, you are rewarded for trying many different ways--and in fact, there were at least a few times where we were totally stumped, positive that we had the right way, only to realize we were looking at the terrain all wrong. This game is worth trying every scenario, because often what looks impossible becomes much more manageable if you're willing to try something else. Sometimes it's not the level that's so awful; it's the lens with which you're looking at it.
No Long Cutscenes
Admittedly, this is no longer NEARLY so bad a thing as it used to be in games. However, the long unskippable cutscene shows a greater problem in game design--namely, the separation of gameplay and story. I hear that RPGs are especially prone to this, where the game's plot and the actual business of level-grinding are almost entirely separate.
In Celeste, there are cutscenes, but they are short and tend to be irrevocably wedded to gameplay. Your character doesn't just have a dream that turns into a nightmare--you PLAY through the dream sequences and the nightmare. (And your "demon self," who first appears in the nightmare... oh, she comes back. She never truly leaves.) Your character doesn't just have panic attacks--the game screen becomes filled with dark tentacles, and you have to play a mini game meant to represent a breathing exercise to help calm her down. (And the breathing exercise symbolically appears again and again for each subsequent level. You must stay calm, keeping that balance in not just your character's mind, but your own, to really enjoy the game.)
Pretty much every time a cut scene displays anything--Theo escaping the hotel through a vent, for instance--it's important. (That same vent becomes your route to the level's Crystal Heart.) It moves the plot AND the characters forward. For instance, as the Mirror Temple becomes more and more horrific, distorted by Theo and your character's own neuroses, your demon self appears again and talks to you. She insists she's not the one doing it, but your character blames her anyway, ending in the demon self losing her patience, chewing your character out, and abandoning you. You had your chance, and you lost it, and it'll come back to bite you hard in the next level.
Also all of the cutscenes are skippable.
This game is a delight. I am so glad we got it.
The basic story is, you are a girl who decides to climb a mountain. Your life has sunk to such a self-defeating rut that you have to do SOMETHING, so you might as well climb Mt. Celeste. The thing is, there's a reason nobody lives on Mt. Celeste except a batty old lady. The mountain has a habit of making your inner terrors real. The further you go, the more clear it gets that you aren't just fighting a relentlessly difficult mountain; you're also fighting yourself tooth and nail every step of the way, and that just isn't tenable. You can't keep living this way, and the mountain becomes a symbol not just of how unbearable things have gotten, but how they can be transformed.
It is possibly the most Sneak game ever created. It fulfills all the Sneak criteria, and all of them are thematically important:
- You don't kill anything.
- Easy to learn, hard to win.
- Rewards creativity.
- No long unskippable cutscenes.
Death
Though you don't kill anything in Celeste, you yourself will die hundreds, thousands, countless times, and the game will track every one. (Right now we're somewhere around 12,000.) This might seem an act of sadism, but the game explicitly tells you to be proud of your death count: it's proof that you're learning.
In most games, death is a fail state, a punishment for messing up. But in Celeste, death is a teacher. You have infinite lives, save points are generous, and your deaths very quick, a mere pause to figure out what went wrong. You might be stumped as to how to traverse a room, give it your best shot, and die quickly, but the death itself often gives you the clue to success. Then it's just a matter of dying over and over as you fine-tune your strategy.
Your character in Celeste admits that she struggles with anxiety and depression, and paralytic fear of failure is an ongoing theme in the game, to the point that Theo, a new friend you meet while climbing, gets sealed inside an unbreakable crystal prison, stared at by dozens of enormous eyeballs, unable to move. He is completely safe (well, unless you hurl him into a bottomless pit by accident), and can't fail at anything he does... because he can't do anything.
In Celeste (as in real life), you must fail. It is the only way to progress.
Death in video games is such a standby that we never really stop to consider what it means, in the game's own universe. It's just how it works--you screw up, you die. But Celeste subtly acknowledges it. Through the part of the level where you have to bodily carry Theo (crystal prison and all), he speaks to you, mostly to urge you on or remark on a puzzle getting solved. However, at one point he only speaks to you after you've died a few times. "You can do this," he tells you.
Which begs the question: are Theo and your character on some level aware of their deaths? Are they aware of their mistakes, just as you the player are? Theo, at least, seems to be. (At the B-side version of that level, which is optional to play, he asks, "Is this canon?")
In other games, this might just be leaning on the fourth wall, but if Mt. Celeste is entirely devoted to forcing you to confront yourself... what if the mountain itself is what endlessly resurrects you? What if the mountain wants you to learn?
You and Theo are not the only characters dealing with their mortality in the game--so are the other human characters. The batty old lady, the sole surviving resident on the mountain, says she likes living there, that the mountain keeps her sharp and humble. Despite her advanced age, she has no desire to leave the mountain, even though there are no other living residents to help her. She mentions that she's slowing down, at times even struggling... but she seems to have made her peace with it. (And who knows? Maybe she's already died many times and trusts the mountain to do right by her.)
And then you have Mr. Oshiro, the ghostly propietor who owns the (now falling apart) fancy resort hotel. It's never entirely clear how Mr. Oshiro dies; notes in the game show that after the hotel has to be shut down, he can't quite bear to leave, leaving only an unsettling suggestion (for us, at least) that he might've committed suicide so he'd never have to.
Mr. Oshiro is still in the hotel, unable to leave, still desperately trying to pretend everything is fine, even as his anxiety metastasizes into black red-edged blobs that infest the hotel and kill everything on sight. He doesn't even seem to notice the blobs are there; he never acknowledges their existence until the end credits of the game, even though they're the reason he can't bear to clean the hotel. It's like the mountain won't let him go, keeps trying to make him learn, but Mr. Oshiro is so fixed in denial that he can't. And so he's trapped in a collapsing hotel full of his anxieties, a literal shade of who he once was. (Until the end credits, which shows him finally, finally acknowledging his black blobs and putting them to work as he starts finally cleaning his beloved hotel.)
The golden strawberries, which are optional collectibles gotten by beating levels all the way through without dying once, are by far the most frustrating part of the game. They seem oddly counter to the game's overall philosophy and message... but they are completely optional. There is literally NOTHING to be gained from the golden strawberries--no secret areas of the game, no additions to the story. Maybe the game is trying to make a point about how trying to play without mistakes is way, way more difficult and frustrating than just failing and learning. It's almost like the game is asking, "Why are you so determined to get EVERYTHING, even though it's for nothing but bragging rights?"
Easy to Play, Hard to Win
This is the only game that has ever left me going, "I can't believe I did that!" (followed immediately by, "thank god I never have to do it again.")
There are really only a few things you can do in this game. You can walk. You can jump. You can hang on (or climb). And you can dash. That's it. The game takes these very simple building blocks, and builds magnificent architecture out of them.
The control scheme was mostly alien to us at the start, making for a very frustrating beginning. We bungled the most basic procedures, trying to learn the unfamiliar keys. That alone took a couple of days. But then, it seemed almost magic, watching our character dashing and leaping through areas that had seemed teeth-gnashingly difficult just a few hours before. I have never played a game where progress and learning were so visible and noticeable, where you can feel the impossible becoming challenging becoming effortless.
To our surprise, we sometimes improved at the game when emotionally drained. That empty-headedness kept us from psyching ourselves out and overthinking the whole thing. Maddeningly tricky jumps became automatic muscle memory, thoughtless and effortless, which certainly seems relevant for a game about dealing with anxiety. All the conscious thinking and worrying just makes it easier to bungle; this is a game demanding utmost precision, but succeeding at it requires letting go of control. The immensely complicated becomes simple and intuitive.
As I got to the hardest parts, the C-sides of game levels, I found myself mentally telling myself to think light, pretend I was floating, as though that could somehow translate to my character's jumps. Really, I was trying to keep my mind empty. But it seemed to work! And oh, the wonder of everything snapping into focus, where the hardest, most insane jumps suddenly become effortless! The glee at running, jumping, and dashing through areas that even Theo calls "clearly impossible!"
At first, the levels are focused on the earth, but as you climb higher and higher, your character's feet barely touch the ground. She breaks free of her mind like gravity, dashing more and more through the air until she is flying. You are flying.
Creativity
I mentioned that sometimes being exhausted and mindless helped improve our performance in this game. But this is the only platformer we've ever played where we had to sometimes walk away from it and consciously ponder out a puzzle, sometimes for days. (And sometimes, the smallest "why is that there?" confusions led to unlocking it.)
Yes, this is a game where sometimes you have to get out of your own way. But it's also a game where you have to consciously stop, put it down, and go ponder some things out. But all the puzzles felt possible. With the exception of one puzzle that refers to Mario 3, none of them require outside knowledge. If you sit and think about it, and carefully look at everything, eventually you will find out all the game's secrets.
(Except that one Crystal Heart puzzle in the A-side of the Mirror Temple. We NEVER would've figured that one out.)
For a lot of this game, there is more than one way to get almost anywhere. Until things get their absolute hardest and most demanding, you are rewarded for trying many different ways--and in fact, there were at least a few times where we were totally stumped, positive that we had the right way, only to realize we were looking at the terrain all wrong. This game is worth trying every scenario, because often what looks impossible becomes much more manageable if you're willing to try something else. Sometimes it's not the level that's so awful; it's the lens with which you're looking at it.
No Long Cutscenes
Admittedly, this is no longer NEARLY so bad a thing as it used to be in games. However, the long unskippable cutscene shows a greater problem in game design--namely, the separation of gameplay and story. I hear that RPGs are especially prone to this, where the game's plot and the actual business of level-grinding are almost entirely separate.
In Celeste, there are cutscenes, but they are short and tend to be irrevocably wedded to gameplay. Your character doesn't just have a dream that turns into a nightmare--you PLAY through the dream sequences and the nightmare. (And your "demon self," who first appears in the nightmare... oh, she comes back. She never truly leaves.) Your character doesn't just have panic attacks--the game screen becomes filled with dark tentacles, and you have to play a mini game meant to represent a breathing exercise to help calm her down. (And the breathing exercise symbolically appears again and again for each subsequent level. You must stay calm, keeping that balance in not just your character's mind, but your own, to really enjoy the game.)
Pretty much every time a cut scene displays anything--Theo escaping the hotel through a vent, for instance--it's important. (That same vent becomes your route to the level's Crystal Heart.) It moves the plot AND the characters forward. For instance, as the Mirror Temple becomes more and more horrific, distorted by Theo and your character's own neuroses, your demon self appears again and talks to you. She insists she's not the one doing it, but your character blames her anyway, ending in the demon self losing her patience, chewing your character out, and abandoning you. You had your chance, and you lost it, and it'll come back to bite you hard in the next level.
Also all of the cutscenes are skippable.
This game is a delight. I am so glad we got it.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-25 06:18 pm (UTC)Thank you for writing this up! It probably sounds ridiculous but it means a lot to us when we see others giving Celeste love. It's really relatable in the sense that Badaline (yep, that's her official name according to the Steam cards released) is a LOT like Tris, who used to be our main persecutor
Anyways, glad to see another person enjoying a really great game :D
-Kam
no subject
Date: 2018-10-04 04:46 pm (UTC)Yeah, Celeste is great and we're super-glad to have gotten to play it! And Badeline reminds me of how I used to portray Edward Cullen as my personification for self-hate, only played for drama rather than comedy.
Also I appreciate that it takes a goodly amount of time and effort to rebuild the relationship with her.
--Rogan