4/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of Celeste.

I’ve always wanted to play “Celeste” ever since I first heard about it. I knew very little about it other than it’s high praise and about the villain being Badeline, so I was really excited when I bought the physical version back in January. After taking it out of the backlog and essentially completing the game 100%, I can say that I see why people give it such high praise, but I can’t say the journey was worth all the effort I put into it. Essentially what I’m saying is that I wish I just played the main story. The main seven chapters you go through, playing a Madeline as she climbs up Celeste Mountain. The story to be had here is great, which is my personal favorite aspect about the game. The cast of characters featuring Madeline, Theo, Granny, Oshiro, Badeline and a few others really left an impact on me and I can’t tell you enough to just check this game out for its deep story alone. I really appreciated the fact that Theo had a real Instagram page you could check out to see some of the story from his perspective, really great attention to detail. Especially the links between the main story and the free DLC “Chapter 9: Farewell”. The game also features really good pixelated graphics which really stood out to me and made a lot of the set pieces very memorable in my mind. But most of all, Celeste is know for its challenge… Its incredibly… Irritating… Frustrating… Insane… Challenge… I seriously couldn’t express how incredibly difficult Celeste is. But that’s what the game is, a rage game, meant to put your platforming skills to the absolute brink. In Dunkey’s review, he stated “You also have a ton of side challenges here where you can win a Strawberry / There design is less about a pixel perfect precision, and more about using your moves in smart, creative ways”. But I personally think that couldn’t be more wrong. Celeste is all about perfect platforming precision. You have to really mail some jumps in this game with little to no wiggle room. You have to do hard jumps and leaps in specific ways, or else your death meter will start going up immensely. The hit boxes in this game are on the dot, there are no square hit boxes, if you touch a single pixel of a spike, you’re dead. This is to say that I believe that Celeste’s challenge is too hard to be enjoyable for my tastes personally. The developers wanted the challenge the player so that they could feel rewarded once finally surpassing it, but I always felt just relief that it was finally over, or just lingering frustration. More specifically Chapter 8 B-Side and onwards. In my playthrough, I collected all 175 of the game’s main Strawberries hidden throughout each of the game’s eight chapters (there’s a single bonus chapter). I collected all eight blue hearts in each level. I beat all eight B-Side chapters and collected the red hearts. And lastly I completed the first four C-Side chapters and collected the yellow hearts. By the time I tried playing Chapter 5 C-Side, I had lost 900 lives before even making it past the first room, so I gave up, turned on Assist Mode, and beat the remaining C-Sides that way, because I couldn’t take the mental anguish of playing through those levels anymore. I also beat Chapter 9, but that’s for a different review. Other than that, there is one thing I neglected to do completely, which was to collect the Golden Strawberries in each version of each level. These require you to to complete an entire level from start to finish without dying once. An incredibly tedious and difficult task that not only is insane to attempt on levels that would normally warrant a good thousand deaths, but it totally goes against the game’s philosophy that’s even stated to the player, no matter how many times you die, through trial and error you will eventually win. That is why I never decided to bother with them. All in all, I spent 34 hours playing through everything Celeste had to offer at launch, and I truly don’t believe that it was worth playing through all of those insanely difficult levels. It was mainly in order to play Chapter 9, as you need to complete the B-Sides of Chapters 1 through 7 in order to get past a pillar halfways through it, and since Chapter 9 continues the story, I thought I’d see it through. Two of my friends have picked up Celeste since I started, and I told them that maybe they shouldn’t due to its high amount of difficulty. So while Celeste deserves every ounce of praise it gets, and its story is certainly one to remember (despite it leaving just a few questions ambiguous, like what happened between Madeline and her ex); I can’t fully recommend you play everything this game has to offer, especially if you’re not up for the incredible challenge that this game brings. So once again, if I’m to recommend this game, it’s for the deep yet warm story it tells throughout the adventure, and that’s what makes this game stand out amongst other play friends and games in general.