Celeste! ♫ the best a game can get ♫

how far are you? are you speedrunning anything yet?

or also, maybe, what is celeste? what is this game "celeste" that everyone's talking about?

I've done the first three stages, the first two B-sides, and all of a certain extra you can access from stage three. I was surprised by how emotional I got at the end of the second stage.

this game is sw8 but i am horrible at it. horrible at all twitchy games. i'm about as far in as ^^^ and already there have been a bunch of times where i can't seem to progress without stepping away from the current room for a few hours, only to come back, beat it, and have to do the same for the very next room, ad roominum.

not a bad thing necessarily, just makes me question if my thumbs are doing what i think i'm telling them to.

that's about where i am, too, although i haven't even tried the b-sides yet. i'm not really a speedrunner type but i can see trying to set a good PR for the first couple chapters. they seem like they'd actually be possible to do in one run, without dying, with enough practice. and even if your PR is several minutes slower than some absurdly good 7-year-old, it's still satisfying in a very particular way to have the ability to run through a crazy series of obstacles without dying a single time.

i've done the main story and full cleared chapter 1 and 1B, will get around to the rest at some point once i've shrunk my games-ive-bought-but-havent-played list

i legitimately think this is a 10/10 game and the best pure platformer i've ever played. everything people here were talking about when trying to sell me & others on Dark Souls applies here, about how the game patiently teaches you how to improve at it until by the end you're blasting through screens that would have looked impossible at the start. the chase/boss sequences are really intense but i found myself cruising through stretches of them purely on the instincts that the game had provided me through the design of the levels leading up to them. very cool.

also i'm playing on switch and i cannot commit to a consistent control scheme, for some things i have to use the analog stick and some things i have to use the d pad buttons. i think i'm just bad at games.

i'm playing on ps4. i have been playing with the d-pad, but my thumb is seriously sore! i had to switch to analog last night because it was just getting so painful

i use stick for that reason. my right thumb gets sore after a bit from all the jumping/dashing though. can't really marathon this for that reason.

i'd recommend climbing the whole mountain before digging into the B-sides if you want a proper ascending difficulty curve. there were a couple screens in 1B that required more precision than anything in the regular levels

glad to hear that - it's why i was holding off. i didn't want to exhaust myself trying to beat the amped up versions of the normal levels before checking out rest of the game

really loving the mirror chapter, which i wasn't enjoying as much at first.

i am such a stan for this game right now

i beat the mirror chapter with only 338 deaths! beat THAT

I just beat Mirror Temple (chapter 5). for some reason I was compelled to grind out 2B yesterday. I died well over 1000 times!

This is a total 10/10 goty masterpiece, an apogee of the genre. It hooks right into your brain and wires you up to the analog stick, training you to be capable of precision you wern’t before. Who knows, after beating this game I might be able to do a quarter circle forward.

tim rogers said this game had the best jump he had ever experienced. i don't know if it tops SMB3, but it's right up there. when you play you ARE celeste (wait...is the main character celeste? i'm not even sure)

Celeste is the mountain

but maybe the mountain is the character too, in a way

*bong rip*

you guys have completely sold me on this but i'm afraid it's not good for me to do this on the switch... maybe ps4 is the better bet?

I've been playing on the Switch Pro controller, and it's taking me some effort to get used to it, but the game does seem to do a pretty good job at throwing you new challenges that at first seem impossible but, slowly but surely, become achievable. And then it starts all over again with the next screen. As I posted to the Switch thread, right now I can't imagine playing more than 20 minutes or so at a stretch, which means only 12949439 deaths or so.

got this last night for ps4 and yeah, super fun

also agree that it's a 20-30min max type deal for me

same on all points and ditto but the stress is pretty great. I suck at this.

karl have u considered that maybe the mountain is us

*stares vacantly into middle distance*

Haha, yeah right after posting that I progressed a bit more and there was a nice conversation about the mountain. Now I know that the mountain is Taum Sauk Mountain, in Missouri.

i'm about to dive back in for the ...6th chapter? not sure what i'm up to. for some reason this is more of a 2-3 hours at a time kind of game for me. i'm playing dark souls 3, too, and it's interesting to go back and forth between the two styles of YOU DIED. the dark souls version can be more heartbreaking (and hard to bounce back from) when the tough part is a boss fight that takes a couple minutes to reach in the first place. it's nice in Celeste to just regenerate in the same spot and give it another shot a second or two later. so far i haven't hit any rooms that take longer than 5 minutes or so to get through, and a lot of them i'm able to just push my way through first time on some sort of crazy intuitive hellride like ciderpress mentioned above:

the chase/boss sequences are really intense but i found myself cruising through stretches of them purely on the instincts that the game had provided me through the design of the levels leading up to them. very cool.

ps sleepingbag i just noticed "ad roominum" in your post above, lol

https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/7tuubc/hey_were_the_dev_team_behind_celeste_ask_us/

wow. just made it to the end! i finished in just a touch under 11 hours

there's a certain kind of fun to be had with the kinds of AAA games that have enormous sandbox areas and a million sidequests in addition to the main storyline. but i feel like the end state those kinds of games lead to is exhaustion. you tackle as many sidequests as you can until you've had enough, then quit or take on the final mission. after all that work and time and effort (and some fun, sometimes), you just kind of stick a fork in it.

NOT SO with celeste. jfc, the end game amps up the intensity (not necessarily the difficulty) so much it's unbelievable! there is a boss showdown that is just O_O.
there's all sorts of stuff to do and go back to. i haven't done any of the b-sides.

i can think of only two criticisms for this game.
1) it makes my thumb hurt
2) i wish it had a simple map showing which rooms you've visited and their entrances/exits

that's it. wow. *howls at the moon*

just read this short little interview here: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2018/01/feature_conquering_the_indie_mountain_with_celeste_creator_matt_makes_games

What does the future hold for Celeste?

Hopefully, a game that people remember and come back to fondly. I don't think we have any plans to create a sequel to Celeste - it really feels like we told the story we wanted to tell.

fuck yeah, that's what i'm talking about. make a perfect game, then drop the mic and go to the next one

https://www.instagram.com/TheoUnderStars/

Madeleine. Celeste. Coincidence in a game about time and memory, or are there any -or any more obvious - proust references?

Wondering whether to buy this - is it fun, or is it too twitchy/tense to count as relaxing?

I've just been replaying 10,000,000 (not a platform game) but that's about as breakneck as I can handle a modern game before I stop finding it fun

As I observed, it's weirdly chill, almost zen-like, despite being so stressful. Context counts, I guess?

It makes my hands sweat

It is really unbelievable how often you die on this game. And crazy that I'll pass a room first try, and then take twenty tries on my next run through it

the rooms are small enough and the reset times after death so quick that its not stressful really, and you feel satisfied after finally figuring out a room

i was feeling really good about trying to 100% the game. i went back and got all the strawberries for chapters 1 and 2, completed their b-sides, recorded 0 death runthroughs (2:35 and 3:31 respectively)

but shiiiit the difficulty does ramp up a bit for chapter 3. i managed to find all the strawberries but i'm not sure i'll ever be able to do a 0 death run (which is important to me for some reason)

Wow that's crazy

I got to the windy level and my internal rating for this game dropped from a 10/10 to an 8/10

Windy level can go fuck itself

I stopped even thinking about the strawberries on this level

windy level was my least favorite, but chapter 5 is better. and then everything to the end is just O_O (i thought)

You guys are nuts. I hadn't really touched it since the day I bought it, but was playing tonight and there was one screen on chapter 1 - yes, near the very beginning - that was kicking my ass so hard I was convinced my controller was broken and was even googling known issues. Eventually I found someone on youtube, and yeah, I was literally never going to figure out this screen, but the dude's play did help me realize what I was doing wrong. For some reason either I didn't know or had forgotten that you can only dash once before landing on ground, which means you can only *jump* off things you're clinging to, not *dash* off them (right?). However, you can just jump into the void and *then* dash. Just once, though, unless you get one of those recharging things.

Anyway, I'm old and my thumbs hurt.

"I'm old and my thumbs hurt" is what how this game is meant to make you feel

Anybody I've shown it to under 30 is like "lol you are old, we don't know how to play this kind of shit"

i finally figured out how to stream on twitch from my ps4 (i had weird microphone issues), so i'm going to work on the chapter 3 b-side in a sec. or start to figure out how to do it quickly without dying

in case anyone is incredibly bored tonight. i'm all by myself tonight and my dog has already been taken out, so this is going to be a wednesday night epiiiic stream

https://www.twitch.tv/weinventyou

Watched for a little while. Those levels look pretty hard!

they are intensely hard! room 4 of ch. 3 b-side now

ok WHOA, say what you want about the windy level, but the crystal heart for it is the beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeest of all time. i have never thought so highly of a collectible.

only like four strawberries in but this is very nice

Karl, I watched yr videos (I've never watched Twitch before!), that looks intense

I think I may regrettably have to accept that, if I struggled to even beat the first boss on Shovel Knight, Celeste may not be the Game For Me

Yeah Karl has cured me of my thirst for this :/

Oh shit

I saw that crystal heart (vanilla run through) but I didn't know how to jump up to it and gave up

Whoops?

fwiw the vanilla levels are not nearly as hard as the ones karl is playing there

Oh yeah, I was mainly working on the chapter 3 b-side and that was intense. It took about 500-600 deaths to get through!

Andrew I feel bad if I ruined it for you! ciderpress is right about the vanilla game not being nearly so hard. The first chapter in particular is a gem of level design, gradually teaching the skills of the game to newcomers. If I have time later tonight I’d be happy to do a leisurely chapter one strawberry hunt! I’ll let y’all know here if I do.

fgti

Let’s just say that to get to it you have to think about the game’s influences. I couldn’t believe it when it actually worked!

the game has accessibility options that let you adjust the difficulty in a pretty granular way! I believe you can turn down the speed, add extra dashes, and turn off spike damage. Play this cool game!

the thread title delights me every time I see it.

:) i was hoping someone else would like that

I don't think this game is all that hard? The main story is quite doable. The post-summit stuff is much harder but that's your treat for completing the game.

yeah, agreed. it never felt unfairly difficult to me. well, not until one part towards the end of the summit b-side, I guess.

never made it past the first screen of the c-side resort. I think I doubled my death count on that one screen alone!

I really liked this game, but gave up on it pretty early. Maybe I'll go back to it some day.

zs, you seen robot assisted runs? this one is particularly nuts

watched this yesterday. Some of the middle section parts were truly insane. I love the bot's approach to the black blobs in the hotel.

beat 7B a week or two ago, it was A Lot.

preview track from the OST for the upcoming Chapter 9 is up

https://radicaldreamland.bandcamp.com/album/celeste-farewell-original-soundtrack

chapter 9 out now !

Celeste wasn't very interesting when I tested it. The collectable apples were annoying. The dash jump wasn't special. The story was as light as any flash game. It looked like any flash game.

Watched the speedrun and the game never got any better.

So you’re hinting that you didn’t enjoy the game

I never understood how it got so much hype

Sorry I guess. It’s probably my favorite game of all time, if such a thing is meaningful.

As someone who gave up/set it aside pretty early on, but still appreciated what I played, I think it's because it's a super-challenging platformer that isn't based on lucky bullshit, just perseverance. But I think more importantly, those rapid respawns are key. If it took just another few milliseconds to try again, people would have been pissed. (fwiw despite Hollow Knight being a personal all-time fave, I never pursued the harder post-game levels, because like Celeste I ultimately find that stuff more frustrating than fun, even when the game looks gorgeous.)

It's crazy how much work the developers must have done to create content that's only going to be seen (outside of cheats and youtube videos) by very few ultra-skilled players. I beat the game, but almost all of the B-sides, all of the C-sides and all of Chapter 9 are just impossible for me--and for a lot of other people like me, I think. I'm not complaining, though! It's just amazing that they've put so much effort into the margins

you can turn on assist mode if you want to see it!

7B was a journey

I just started playing the game and finished the first two chapters... Can anyone tell me, without spoiling too much, does anything actually happen if you collect all the strawberries? Or all the crystal hearts? Or are they there just so you can brag about having found all of them?

The game explicitly tells you that you don’t have to collect the strawberries.

Yeah, I know, but I was wondering whether collecting them unlocks some extra content or something.

strawberries are completely optional. there's a bonus level that needs some hearts to unlock but you don't need all of them iirc.

Thanks!

Chapter 9 is a motherfucker. Haven’t messed with the b-sides but I’m sure I’ll get there before the end of the holiday.

And there are C-Sides? Curious how the difficulty stacks up against Chapter 9, which I am struggling with but chipping away at. Undeniably great platformer, really keeps me coming back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sJkEWlyk74

https://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=100323

I’m on chapter 2 of this and it’s GREAT, actual sweaty palms stuff, got both bsides but few strawberries, but sometimes you just can’t be fucked, you know?

likewise hooked on this, so many indelible touches around pretty flawless level design. 100% strawberries so far

Got back into playing this. Wasn't 100% feeling this but now I've got to Oshiro's hotel, I'm loving it.
However, I have a bad habit of getting really far, then rage quitting and forgetting to save my game!
All the same, it's wonderful how you can spend ages and ages and ages simply trying to get past the first obstacle on a screen, and then suddenly it comes so naturally you can do the whole thing in one fluid motion. Reminds me of learning a tricky piece on an instrument.

I cannot be bothered with most strawberries though

Yeah it's a satisfying feeling, like you just gained a new skill in life, have you tried 1001 Spikes? It's full of that sort of experience. Dick rippingly frustrating mind.

Oh man the strawberries in the hotel are what put me off the game!

Also I do not understand B-sides, and have only found one so far.

b-sides unlock another version of that level that is EVEN HARDER!

(there's also c-sides)

:D strawberries are my favorite part of the game. they're totally optional! they're similar to modern day marios where every level has a handful of yoshi coins that really are more just for completionists

also LOVE the strawberries. i had to get every last one. they are optional and don’t amount to much in the end but encourage you to explore and really get familiar with each stage.

i tapped out on the c-sides a while ago and now i feel old and out of shape. booted up the new DLC from earlier this year and that was a rude awakening to be sure.

I have been really enjoying this. Mostly just picking it up, clearing 1–3 screens, then saving and putting it back down. A great way to scratch that video game itch with my short attention span.

Love it, been stuck in mirror temple for about a year now

I whizzed through a whole bunch of this a few weeks ago but gave up around the windy levels

picked this back up and are being eaten by a fish in the mirror level. gonna carry on tomorrow when my red raw thumb recovers.

fuck a s/berry tho, I've never been a completionist. just wanna see how Madeline's story ends.

also, it turns out streaming on twitch concentrates my mind and gives me sufficient gee-up to persevere.

this game is fkn tough

just started a game called Olija, which is a bit like Celeste meets Castlevania but with more of a puzzle element than fast-twitch action. Feeling it so far!

started playing this today and uh it says i died 341 times on the hotel level. my thumb hurts so much.

oh my god the fucking mirror level

i gave up on the wind levels. great game but life is too short

Turn on assist mode! The end of the game is so nice 😭

Turn on assist mode!

^^^

also relevant for people struggling with hades

Celeste's dialogue design is the #1 most-asked-about topic when it comes to the game's sound. I figured I'd share some of how we went about creating it. pic.twitter.com/HVpRdvlfAD

— Kevin Regamey (@regameyk) July 17, 2021

That's neat. I personally like the emotive gibberish of "Hollow Knight."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekz4-SNVJjU

bafanada

another celeste mario ("hastily made with levels designed within two months"), nice humblebrag:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbQmiDDAx3A