Celeste (PS4, 2018)
Although the 2D platformer is one of the oldest video game genres, it's not one I've played a lot. My first console was a SNES so I had some Marios and an Aladdin game, but I was very young and I could never finish them. I tried Mario and Mario 3 when I was old enough to know what I was doing and I never made it to the end of 3. Even in the modern era it's not something I've spent a lot of time with. At least, looking at my PlayStation profile there's one thing that almost all of the platformers on there have in common. They're all easy and accessible. Braid is about the hardest thing I've finished.
And so we come to Celeste, a 2D platformer in which you control a girl called Madeline as she climbs a mountain while suffering from mental health problems, dealing with people along the way who suffer from mental health problems. Controls are the standard runny jumpy affair, with some additions. You can cling to vertical surfaces for a limited time. You can double jump or dash when in the air, and throughout the different sections of the game there are new interactive elements introduced to get you through the environments.
The controls are probably exactly what you need for a game like this. They're easy to understand and quickly become intuitive once you've played for about five minutes. Each chapter is split into individual areas with either a straightforward route to the exit or a few objects you need to gather to open up the next area. This means you have regular checkpoints, but it also means the controls have to be as tight and refined as they are to ensure it's always a logical solution to progress. This doesn't mean it's always easy to carry out the right commands once you know what to do, but I'll get to more on that later.
Each of the game's main chapters introduces a new object to interact with, either to platform on (is platform a verb as well as a noun in this context?) or to avoid on fear of death. Each of these (except the dark blocks you direct as they're moving) is as quickly logical as the standard controls, which opens up the range of puzzles available. This, along with the backgrounds and music keeps the game fresh and interesting throughout.
Celeste feels like a very modern platformer and a big part of this is the aesthetic. If you read the word aesthetic in italics, or with some squiggly punctuation either side of it. The retro pixel-art style of the characters and backgrounds is bold and engaging. The lack of detail in the player characters - especially when contrasted with the depth of the backgrounds - is a nice homage to the origin of 2D platformers while still feeling refined. The music is similar, sounding obviously modern but in a retro style which complements the art style nicely. Crucially, it only rarely gets irritating when you're stuck on an area for a long time.
The pixelated art style of the characters and backgrounds is in contrast to the dialogue boxes at the top of the screen which tells the game's story. A character's face appears, the words they're saying appear on the screen next to them, and some noises that sound a bit like Pingu come out. A clever way to get around language localisation problems for a small developer. I think I found this the most endearing part of the game, hearing these noises actually correspond to the emotions the characters were expressing. I also liked the image of certain characters reaching out of their little avatar space when they were terrorising Madeline. The game has lots of small touches like this that feel like they were all created very deliberately. You start noticing things and then you start trying to notice things, because you realise if someone put them there they must be important.
That isn't to say I found and noticed them all myself and found the game as deep and engaging as I'm making it out to be but again, I'll come to that later.
What then of Madeline, and the story? Madeline gets to the mountain. Madeline is adamant she's going to climb it even though she's scared. Madeline meets and old woman who laughs at her and says she'll never make it. Madeline has a panicked phonecall to a mysterious figure who's not seen again saying she's scared, they tell her she always phones in the middle of the night claiming something bad is happening. Madeline walks past a mirror and breaks it, and a dark, purple-haired version of Madeline pops out and terrorises her through gameplay and the story, and so begins the obvious allegory for mental illness.
I had a vague idea of what the premise of Celeste was before I went in. I also noticed that when Badeline (yes, aren't the game's fans hilarious) appeared and was saying things I was often too focused on trying to avoid dying to really appreciate what she was saying. You see, Madeline is trying to climb the mountain. Badeline, who is all of Madeline's fears, anxieties, doubts and failings, tries to stop her. Tells her consistently that she won't do it, tells the other characters that they won't and they're horrible people. Eventually Madeline comes to realise that she can't suppress or hide from Badeline, she has to embrace her and use their strengths together to keep climbing.
As much as I can look at Celeste and recognise it does many things well mechanically, artistically and thematically, something about Madeline's relationship with herself seems too obvious for me to find it profound. In some ways it feels obvious what happens and what is supposed to happen. In other ways - and I appreciate quite how much personal insight I'm revealing here - it just ends up leaving me feeling inadequate, since I've spent my life not facing up to my problems the way Madeline does, and I know even once I've finished the game I'm not going to. The deliberateness I mentioned earlier almost feels like a failing here, with the resolution being a bit too neat and obvious.
It's not just through Madeline and Badeline that this is explored, there are other characters along the way. If you've played the game, I spent the entire time hoping Theo was going to get thrown off the mountain and die, but it didn't happen and I feel a bit robbed. I don't feel right criticising the game in this way but the central premise of the player character feels like something I should identify with, and I just don't. I don't know how much of that is down to me and how much to the game, but the result is something which I know means a lot to a lot of people in a way it doesn't to me. As I write this now I think I shouldn't care what other people think, and you shouldn't, but does that mean I've missed out on something?
One nice way the gameplay is tied into Celeste's depiction of mental health struggles is dying. In one of the loading screens the game cheerily tells you to be proud of your death count. "The more you die, the more you're learning." This brings me to my biggest problem with the game's controls. This concept, in theory, is sound. I'm a big sim racing fan and I'm currently playing Trackmania Turbo, so the concept of constantly trying and failing and learning isn't lost on me. On difficult platformers like Celeste I can see the point too, and there's no denying that as you go on the game's difficulty progresses steadily, but always within reach of what the player is capable of doing.
There are two problems with this. The first is how refined the controls are. I played with a gamepad obviously and you have eight directions of movement. Up down left right and then up left, up right, down right, down right. Straightforward enough. Using either the d-pad or joystick though, it's not always easy to point Madeline in the direction you need to. When you're doing quick jumps and platforming through small or moving gaps and you need to land in a certain place to recharge your jumps or there's wind blowing affecting your trajectory, this is a problem. This isn't learning by doing or dying, this is knowing what you need to do but needing to hope your inputs are smooth enough that the game knows what you're trying to do.
I realise this makes it sound like I'm trying to blame the game for me not being any good at it, but I honestly don't think that's the problem. I'll give you the best example. A collectible later in the game requires you to slide down a vertical wall, dash to the right to pick it up, fall a little bit, then dash left to get back to the wall. There's a very small path for you to do this without touching something that kills you. There's no learning or figuring out required here. Once you've reached it, you can look at it and know exactly what to do. Then you can spend half an hour trying and failing to do it like I did, and the novelty wears off. It might not be the game, it might be me, it might even be my controller which does have some stick drift, but either way to me it's not difficulty or learning, it's just level design which doesn't fit with what the player is able to do.
What makes me start leaning towards it being my fault rather than the game's is the game's final chapter, B-Side and C-Side levels, and some of the harder to reach collectibles. The game's main story has six chapters and then an epilogue. The difficulty curve throughout is fair and never felt cheap or easy. Later levels are noticeably harder than early ones and my death count (which the game tracks for you to wear as a badge of honour) reflects this. The B-Sides and C-Sides are hidden throughout the normal levels and once you collect them you can try them from the main menu. Effectively they're like a condensed version of Celeste, shorter and with the difficulty and precision ramped up.
I think with enough time and practice I could get through these. Eventually. What I couldn't get through are chapters 8 and 9. You see, these are post-game chapters where the difficulty doesn't so much follow a curve as it does become completely vertical. It gets so steep it practically becomes an acute angle. Most of this is optional and doesn't really offer much in the way of story or narrative so it's fair to say it's content aimed at the Celeste-obsessed. Going into chapter 9 I scraped past the first couple of areas then realised how large and complex and precise they were becoming, and I realised I just couldn't.
But, then, I could. Celeste has an Assist Mode, where you can change gameplay settings. You can turn down the game speed. You can give yourself unlimited stamina for clinging to walls, you can give yourself unlimited dashes and you can use dash assist, which lets you aim your dashes more precisely. I used these when I was clearing up the last of the game's collectibles I hadn't found, and I felt like I was just about getting away without cheating the game while using some of these. I still had to control Madeline and not hit anything that could kill her, and if anything this was harder because the urge to spam the dash button could be overwhelming, for me and for her.
Go and look up Celeste chapter 9 speedrun now on YouTube and get back to me. There's only one way I was getting past that and it was using the final assist - Invincibility. As I bounced through the final areas (which are the same as the main game - unique and distinctive) I just laughed, imagining the sort of stress I would have been under if I'd tried to do it legitimately. I spend a lot of time playing video games. While I said earlier I'm not a massive platforming fan, I'm pretty good across various different genres. I can think, I can react, I can take on new skills and adapt to different situations within individual games and across different ones. If Celeste was the only video game I had ever played in my life and I absolutely adored it in a way I found transcendent and life-affirming and any other gushing adjective you want to use, I would not have been able to finish it without Assist Mode.
Which brings me to the point I've been trying to bring up over the past four paragraphs - is this fair? I've finished Celeste. I've earned the Platinum trophy. I've not found quite all of the collectibles and I'm pretty sure I somehow missed the ending where it turns out Madeline is transgender, but I have ostensibly finished and beaten the game. I did so without cheating. I didn't break the game, I didn't do anything which isn't part of the game's design. Did I though? Can I say "I platinumed Celeste" knowing there are people out there who could say the same thing having spent hundreds if not thousands of hours perfecting their runs and strategies to do the same?
I suppose this brings me to my ultimate question of accessibility in games nowadays. I'll be looking at this from a trophy/achievement perspective which I realise isn't for everyone, but it's a verifiable means of tracking progress across the majority of a game's playerbase. There are swathes of things which barely qualify as video games nowadays which are released purely because the people making them know people will buy them because it earns them trophies. My first ever Platinum was Terminator Salvation back in 2009, a game I rented purely because it was known for easy trophies. Play the game on hard and in four hours you'll have a bunch of trophies. So I did. Nowadays you can pay pennies for the same experience in about five minutes.
Celeste is obviously a real and very good game, and even if you played the entire thing with Invincibility turned on and didn't read any dialogue it would still take you a few hours to get to the end. And a few hours more to earn all the trophies. Does the presence of Assist Mode cheapen the story, or the achievement of finishing it without? Does the potential of Assist Mode do this? I genuinely don't know. There are games I'm proud of beating because they're difficult, or at least large and time consuming. I don't know that I'd feel the same way about earning all of Mirror's Edge's trophies if there was an accessibility mode which made Faith automatically climb up every ledge she was near.
At the same time I can't honestly say this is a bad thing because as video games become more mainstream, what harm is there in attempting to reach as much of an audience as possible? Imagine a child or an old person or someone who's never held a controller playing Celeste for the first time, being frustrated by dying all the time and never playing it or anything else again. I know when I was younger lots of games I still have I could never finish. I already mentioned my Super Mario experience, and that was as an adult. If the option of difficulty and precision is still there for people who want to and can handle it, why should anyone else be excluded from the story of Celeste or any other game which has a comparable to Assist Mode? Why would any game developer not include such an option if it's going to make their experience and their story playable by as many people as possible?
Celeste, then. It's alright I suppose.
