It’s the anchor for everything else, and each chapter plays with it in exciting and surprising ways.
But the greatest triumph of Celeste is that its best-in-class jumping and dashing is blended beautifully with an important and sincere story and an incredible soundtrack that make it a genuinely emotional game, even when your feet are planted firmly on the ground.Celeste has one of the best game soundtracks I’ve heard in years.Some of Celeste’s harder levels make its inputs feel like a fighting game, even without any combat.Celeste blends its story beautifully into the arcade-y game that houses it, making me feel for its characters without ever forcing me to.If you buy something through this post, IGN may get a share of the sale. Death is constant, but you instantly respawn at the start of each small puzzle box of a room. I would slowly dial in the angle of a jump or the timing of a pause, all the while getting more consistent at whatever parts came before that tricky bit. On top of the six to eight hours it took to beat the normal levels, I spent nearly another 20 finding collectibles and completing its brutally fun B-Sides - one of which took almost three hours and 1,400 deaths to complete, but had me literally jumping out of my chair with joy at multiple points.
Can you climb that wall without Madeline’s energy giving out? Fast movement is key — platforms crumble and, in later stages, monsters close in. This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. When do you dash?
That answer just trumps everything.For years I’ve wondered why tough-as-nails platformers love spikes so much, and now I know: the spikes are a metaphor. The first takes place in a ruined city near the foot of the mountain and has platforms that speed along a track when you touch them (allowing you to launch yourself with a properly timed jump), while a later chapter is set closer to the peak, where winds will push you around and affect your speed and momentum.
Celeste’s incredible platforming, innumerable secrets, and emotionally genuine story make it a surprise triumph. It is, beat for beat, the perfect companion to the action.I’ve spent all weekend playing this game and have to say I am in awe of it. Wonderful controls, likable characters, and a great soundtrack. Unlike Celeste’s main character, Madeline, Kirby begins his journey as a void of anxiety—and also just a bottomless void in general.
Can you climb that wall without Madeline’s energy giving out? As part of a recent Nintendo showcase during GDC, I got to try out a bunch of indie games that are coming to the Switch. In my first game of Dead Cells, I died after about four minutes. Little touches - like Madeline’s red hair turning blue when she’s spent her dash charge and then back again when it’s restored by touching the ground or touching a power-up, or that dash causing lanterns in the background to sway when she zips by them - make everything feel alive and dynamic.But Celeste doesn’t succeed on charm alone – it also nails the fundamentals of its genre.
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That mid-air dash is a thing of beauty.PC (Played), Playstation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo SwitchCompleted the game in about five hours, collecting a small amount of strawberries. I just wanted to get back to leaping, dashing, and climbing. These changes shuffle levels into puzzles that the player must solve through a mixture of persistence and observation. The hardest of these tested every part of the skills it had taught me: they required a careful eye to find clues about the path leading to them, were challenging to reach once I found them, and some even presented creative riddles that took me days of thinking on to finally crack. I never got frustrated.
He made a video about it. I’d occasionally have a breakthrough in those tough spots as well, fundamentally rethinking how I was coming at a jump and making it much easier as a result, proving that Celeste’s platforming requires smart thinking along with quick control. There are strawberries hidden throughout levels, many of which require daring acrobatics to collect.
There isn’t really any combat in Celeste, but these sequences still manage to be intense and frantic, and a great way to put a different kind of spin on its level design. Sheer walls are scalable, but Madeline’s limited stamina prevents her from hanging onto a cliffside indefinitely.
Its 2D platforming is some of the best and toughest since Super Meat Boy, with levels that are as challenging to figure out as they are satisfying to complete. Such a brilliant game and has kept my undivided attention.
Even though its garbled dialogue voices are a bit silly at first, their changing pitch and intonation (and the shifting portraits that come along with those voices) make each character extremely emotive and relatable. Quick input chains like this can be forgiving early in Celeste, but demand perfection later. They almost felt trivial compared to the new challenges I had faced in the meantime, and it reminded me how achievable completing Celeste’s story chapters really are amid the high skill cap of its end-game - which is great, because it’s worth playing even for those uninterested in pushing themselves further.Celeste’s story starts out cute, with quirky characters and a clear goal for Madeline: climb to the peak of Celeste Mountain.