Celeste

Celeste really is what its about, Climbing a mountain... I picked this game up not knowing what it was. Not having much platforming experience I got it thinking it would be a light and fun game to play for a short bit. I quickly realized I was incorrect and had made a mistake, this game was not for me... but I was struck by one of the first things the game tells you "You can do this" like it knew most people would think this way. So I kept going, easy enough at first but rapidly I was slowed to a dragging pace. At some point in each chapter I would audibly say "There's no way" and would get off. Everytime the next day something would tell me to try again. So I would try, die, try, die, try, die hundreds or thousands of times but eventually I would make it, only to say the same thing the next level. I have played many souls & souls-like games and enjoy high difficulty but this game hits different. Its brutally hard and frustrating and annoying at times but also beautiful and amazing and incredibly rewarding. This game is a mountain. Its filled with walls, setbacks and false peaks but if keep going you will learn can something about yourself. So begin the climb, be persistent and stubborn, forget the failures and relish in the successes and remember "You can do this".

Very good game, the story and it's themes + funky art makes everything beautifully enjoyable. 10/10.
Might turn you into a girl though.

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☐ Your Mom probably would enjoy this
☐ Kids
☐ Everyone
☐ Everyone except kids
☑ Casual players
☑ Pro players
☑ People who plan to take one game and make it their life
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☐ Potato
☐ Really bad
☐ Bad, but playable.
☐ Bad
☐ OK
☑ Good
☐ Beautiful
☐ Masterpiece
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☐ Free
☑ Buy now
☐ Consider to buy it
☐ Worth the price
☐ Wait for sale
☐ Maybe if you have some spare money left
☐ Do not buy it
☐ Do not throw money into a trash can
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☐ 90's PC
☐ Minimum
☑ Medium
☐ Fast
☐ High end
☐ NASA computer
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☐ You just need 2 arms
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Average (Depends on the difficulity set)
☑ Hard
☐ Dark Souls
☑ Only the best of the best can complete this game (for golden berries or mods)
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☐ Long enough for a cup of tea
☐ Short
☐ Not too short
☐ Depends on you
☑ Long
☐ Very Long
☐ Endless
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☐ Only gameplay, doesn't include a story.
☐ There is a story, but most of the game is focused on gameplay.
☐ Better than nothing I suppose...
☐ Average.
☐ Decent.
☑ Amazing
☐ Fantastic!
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☐ Game itself is one big BUG
☐ Bugs destroying the game
☐ Lot of bugs
☐ Few Bugs
☐ You can use them for speedrun
☑ Nothing (I've seen)
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☐ One long, tedious grind
☐ Fun at first, but gets old quick
☐ Better than mobile
☑ Consistently fun
☐ Can't stop playing, even though I should be finished
Comments:
Ive heard a lot about it but never got it until recently... (I spent a week playing it nonstop)
Definitely in my top 10s, the base game is super fun and not insanely difficult like the mods or harder achievements. Its perfect for anyone wanting a good challenge. I was worried about it being long and getting boring over time but it stayed super fun all throughout the game. I loved the story, it wasnt complex but it was a super addition to the game.
I also found the mechanics super easy to learn and very fun to use, the game felt great to play and if I had a neuralizer I would use it on myself to experience this game for the first time again
The game was also a super good length, not too short to feel like it wasnt worth it and not too long to say "jeez when will this end"
I got all the achievements and even the super hard ones didnt feel gruelingly annoying to get, just very challenging
totally worth it 110%
Here is a checklist of stuff you should try:
-getting all berries
-Finishing all b-sides
-Finishing all c-sides
-Getting all the achievements
-getting all gold berries
(for those who want to torture themselves)
I hope this review helps! You can upvote it if you found it helpful!

This is one of those games where I judged it by the cover and did not read enough of the reviews! I though this was going to be a comfy, cozy platformer with a cute story. Ohhh boy was I wrong.
This game is a painstakingly handcrafted instrument of unyielding psychological torture.
Don't get me wrong.. I'm loving it. But goodness gracious, this is challenging. There's like... 4 controls? Direction, jump, climb, and dash. That's pretty much it. But the amount of things they did with that... it's nothing short of amazing.
This is a precision platformer in every sense of the word. You have to practice, die, practice again, and eventually you figure out the timing, the coordination, and all and get it. And that was one room. Now go to the next one. Each room is hand crafted with devious and malicious intent. It's kind of glorious.
The great thing is they don't punish you at all. Respawns are super fast, and you start right at the beginning of the room you were on. Rooms can sometimes be one screen only, so you basically just have to nail the room down. It appears that later in the game there is more scrolling and the rooms get larger, but I'm not quite there yet. Regardless, this can be more challenging than it sounds even if it is only one screen, as usually you need to zig zag through and avoid all kinds of nefarious things they put in your path... but it's doable. And when you finally beat a room, you are happy about it... and then you see the next one.
There are also a bunch of things later in the game, like enemies and such but I have no idea how those work so I won' t comment on them now. There is a story here that appears to be pretty cute. It's a simple story, but I quite like how they present it. It's about a girl named Madeline (changeable) climbing Mount Celeste (yes, I know, I thought Celeste was the girl's name at first as well) to prove to herself that she can.
This is a game that could potentially become frustrating. Frustration is the enemy of gaming, and so I recommend taking it in small doses if you are prone to that. Don't try to play this for 8 hours straight if you are at risk of going full tilt... it won't help. You need to breathe and be calm and coordinated with this game. I play for a room or three, then put it down and do something else. I'll slowly work my way through it over time, and that is fine with me because I enjoy every time I do get into it, and the challenge is always something I'm ready for.
This is a great game, and I am looking forward to slowly working my way through it.
Just breathe, Madeline... you can do this!

Celeste is my favorite game of all time, bar none, and it has been since I first played it six years ago on my Switch. Even after hundreds of hours of playing this game, I can see myself playing this game for hundreds of hours more without tiring of it. Its story, art style, music, and gameplay make it an experience that is hard to forget.
STORY
Celeste's story is probably its most captivating aspect on a first playthrough. Though it doesn't necessarily have most complex narrative, Celeste's characters are well-written and memorable, and its emotional moments are deeply moving, despite the story's simplicity. My favorite part of the story is that instead of simply existing alongside the visuals, music, and gameplay, it is accentuated by these other aspects of the game more so than I find many other games' stories to be.
VISUALS
People often talk about pixellated graphics in games as if they are inherently inferior to games with more realistic graphics. I find Celeste to be a compelling case against this viewpoint, as its visuals make the game look absolutely stunning at some points, despite its "low quality" graphics. Specifically, the color palettes used in each section often complement the mood of that section of the story very well. There are also the cartoon-style portraits representing each character during dialogue - though they might at first seem to clash with the game's pixel graphics during gameplay, I find that these portraits create a nice contrast in art style that make the game look more vibrant. And that's not even to mention the beautiful 3-D modeled mountain that occupies the background in the game's overworld map and title screen.
MUSIC
It's undeniable Celeste's soundtrack was Lena Raine's big break onto the music scene, and it surely doesn't disappoint. Celeste has one of the best and most memorable soundtracks I've ever heard in a game, and both its soft moments and bursts of energy accentuate the story and gameplay perfectly. It's not hard to see why, after Celeste, several other games, most notably Minecraft, enlisted Lena's help on their soundtracks. Though it would also be remiss of me not to mention Lena's fantastic solo work, my favorite of which has to be the EP "Singularity" released under the pseudonym of "Kuraine."
GAMEPLAY
As important as the previous categories are, to me, by far the most important place for a game to succeed is in its gameplay. And, to me, this is where Celeste shines brightest. It should be extremely apparent to anyone who has played this game for any serious length of time that the developers put a lot of care into the way movement feels in this game. Whenever you fail in Celeste, you have no one to blame but yourself, and, for a game as brutal as Celeste can be, that is extremely important. I am constantly impressed by how nuanced this game's movement is, and how it so seamlessly caters both to beginners still just grasping the controls and experts with hundreds or even thousands of hours.
DIFFICULTY
It's no secret that Celeste is a difficult game. Heck, "Difficult" is literally the second tag on its Steam page, right behind "Precision Platformer." Undoubtedly, a game as difficult as Celeste would be hard to stomach if its movement was any less refined than it is. And it's surely by no mistake that Celeste has such consistently stellar level design to accommodate this difficulty. But also, a story about overcoming obstacles as moving as Celeste's would be hard to tell without the player having to go through the same difficulties, frustrations, and setbacks as Madeline. That's where the true beauty of this game's story comes into play, is in its difficulty.
ASSIST MODE
On release, Celeste was lauded for its "Assist Mode," which allows players to adjust the games difficulty if they find the game to be too challenging to overcome but still ultimately want to engage with the games story. And this "Assist Mode" surely holds a lot of nuance, too, allowing players a lot of room for adjustment, ranging from just slowing the game down a little bit to fully making Madeline invincible. Personally, I can't say I'm a big fan of this mode. While I'm normally all for making games accessible to as many people as possible, with a game like Celeste, where the story is so inextricably tied to the game's difficulty, removing the difficulty can make the story feel cheapened as a result. Not to mention the fact that turning off Assist Mode removes the stamp that indicates you've used Assist Mode, which is a weird decision that can make it difficult to verify the legitimacy of achievements in the game, though that may be a moot point.
MODDING
While I normally wouldn't consider a game's modding community when reviewing it, with a community as vibrant as Celeste's it wouldn't be right not to bring up. Celeste has one of the easiest modloaders to both install and use of any game I've played, being surpassed only by Terraria's Steam integration with Tmodloader. There are also modded maps of a wide range of difficulties, ranging from "Beginner" all the way to "Grandmaster," so even if you've only beaten the main game and don't plan to tackle anything more difficult, there is probably still something that will appeal to you in modded Celeste.
CONCLUSION
This game is good. Like, really good. I personally think it's worth picking up at its $20 price point, but even if you aren't willing to pay that much, it frequently goes on sale for as little as $5, so there's really no reason not to give it a go. Also, I think it's making me trans? I didn't know games could do that???

i have nothing else to say that hasn't already been said but i will say i used to be a noob gamer but celeste unfortunately changed all that, took me a thousand hours but im able to say i finished all the b-sides, c-sides, farewell because celeste never gave up on me. every death, every minute with this extraordinary game was worth it. i'll never play another game quite like it.

game turned me into a girl. 10/10 even bought it on nintendo switch just to support the creators