Welcome back to Save State, where I’ve received a few new controllers over the last few weeks. Testing various components requires playing radically different games for extended periods of time. Testing out a controller’s gyroscope can be pretty involved as gyro support is all over the place, so experimenting with my new Steam Controller can require starting up a game like Monster Hunter Wilds, Cyberpunk, or even Aimlabs. Meanwhile, evaluating a controller’s d-pad is most easily done by playing either top-down RPGs with free movement like Chained Echoes, fighting titles, or tough platformers like Contra or Celeste, which is why I own many of these games on both PC and Nintendo Switch.
So, basically, I had started Celeste numerous times over the years to test out controllers, but I never got terribly far in it because I would have had controller reviews to write on a timeline – so once I got a satisfactory feel for the d-pad, I would jump to my next project.
Well, since I bought the Steam Controller with my own hard-earned cash, I figured I could take as much time as I wanted to thoroughly test out every feature, but thoroughly testing out its d-pad caused me to play more into Celeste than I ever had previously. Celeste has been available on Steam for years, so it was a good choice for this. The best thing about Celeste is that it has a low barrier to entry with an incredibly high skill ceiling that’s entirely optional, and on top of that has a pretty touching story that you don’t get out of most indie titles nowadays. Plus, the controls are incredibly tight and make it very obvious when you have made a mistake versus your controller, and there are basically no cheap deaths in the entire game.
Your entire goal in Celeste is to climb a mountain. The mountain is used by the story as a metaphor, and the protagonist Madeline is a character beloved by some but considered repugnant by others because she’s working through something (as in, overcoming something great akin to climbing a mountain). Madeline meets all sorts of characters in her journey, responds sarcastically to many of them, and sometimes makes them realize that they’ve been living a lie for many, many years. The story is pretty touching, especially if you make it all the way to the very end of this mountain-climbing adventure.
Celeste, being a 2D platformer, has very simple controls. You play as Madeline and move left and right with the d-pad (or analog stick, I don’t know your life) and can perform a dash in any direction to gain height or avoid obstacles. You can also cling to walls for a time or wall kick to climb passages, which rounds out Madeline’s base movement kit. Many platforming puzzles will involve knowing when to dash because Madeline can only dash in the air a single time before she needs to touch either a green crystal or the ground again.
That being said, there are some very advanced techniques that players may be required to utilize as they get further in Celeste, such as wallbounces and wavedashing to carry the momentum from dashing up a wall or diagonally against the ground. The ninth chapter was basically made to learn about how to do these requirements, though it could be argued that chapter suffered from difficulty creep due to being a free update post release of the game. On top of Madeline’s core movement mechanics, there are also stage specific gimmicks that you’ll encounter in each chapter, such as falling ice blocks and feathers that allow you to fly for a short period of time.
The vast majority of Celeste is tough but incredibly fair with much of the difficulty stemming from optional collectibles the player can engage with, like strawberries and crystal hearts. There are a couple hundred strawberries hidden across Celeste Mountain, and acquiring strawberries requires you to touch them and then land safely on the ground for a second. Due to their completely optional nature, strawberries are usually harder to obtain than just getting to the end of the chapter, and you can even unlock an achievement for collecting multiple strawberries at once which requires spending most of your time off the ground through multiple rooms.
You can find a tape collectible in each chapter that unlocks the B-Side version of the stage, which is a completely different set of levels in the same theme that are typically much harder. You can even unlock shorter but more difficult C-Side levels by beating chapter 8’s B-Side. Then, if all that isn’t enough for you, the ninth chapter was added in a free update that ramps the difficulty up even further! If you’re just interested in the story of Celeste, you can play the normal stages up through chapter 7, see the epilogue, and then play chapter 8 if you’re up for that. But if you really want a challenge, Celeste has so much to offer that it’s crazy.
Celeste is refreshing in that it offers basically the exact opposite of what Mario games offer. The two are common in that they’re rock-solid platformers with tight controls, but in Celeste there’s a metric ton of difficulty, but the player basically has to choose to engage with it. Even if you should engage with the more difficult stages and collectibles, the punishment for death is so dramatically low that the developers were able to ramp up the challenge in execution without making the game frustrating, which is very tough to do. Something I didn’t remember existed until after beating most of Celeste’s content is the Assist Mode option, which allows you to do things like slow the game down or give Madeline infinite dashes, and there’s even a Variant Mode you unlock after beating chapter 8’s C-Side that can cause Madeline to hiccup every few seconds or turn all surfaces slippery like ice.
All in all, I had a lot of fun finally experiencing Celeste despite owning it on two platforms for probably five years. Playing this allowed me to seriously break in my Steam Controller’s d-pad, which hopefully will allow me to make an even better review on that in the future. So, with that, I think it’s time to bring this entry of Save State to a close, and I just want you to remember: You’re not Sisyphus, and you don’t actually have to spend eternity rolling a ball up a mountain. In fact, Sisyphus probably could have benefitted from wavedash bouncing that boulder. It’s not even hidden tech, what a scrub!
See you all again in two weeks!
