Have you ever played a level in a video game so incredibly difficult that you stood up, threw your controller, and yelled “$%@! this game, I’m out?”

Many fans of video games, especially the so-called “hardcore” gamer crowd, could recount experiences like this (although they really should take better care of their controllers). Yet “hardcore” gamers are also known to decry that “games are too easy these days” and are “made for casuals.” Taken together, these two experiences make these gamers sounds unreasonable. However, while the gatekeep-y and pretentious way they express these ideas can’t be defended, when it comes to difficulty, they really just want what we all want – a game that isn’t too hard or too easy, but in the Goldilocks zone: juuuuuuust right.

For some time now fans, critics, and makers of games have used the psychological concept of “flow” to describe this perfect middle level of difficulty. The term flow was coined in 1975 by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I dare you to try and pronounce his name), although the concept has existed since ancient times by different names. When a player is “in flow,” they’re what we colloquially call “in the zone.” They’re completely focused on the task at hand, and while they face some difficulty, they’re not struggling too much.

We’ll discuss flow in more detail in a minute, but let’s set it aside for a moment to get into the real subject of this article. Few games have kept me in a state of flow as well as Celeste.

Released in 2018, Celeste is a brutally difficult platformer from the indie studio Matt Makes Games. The story and gameplay follows Madeline, a lost-in-life woman who struggles with her self-esteem, as she attempts to scale the dangerous Mt. Celeste just to prove to herself that she can. Madeline has just three main tools to aid her in her quest: her jumps, the ability to cling on to and climb up walls, and one midair 8-way directional dash that refreshes whenever she touches the ground. There’s a lot in this game to love, from its fluid movement to its gorgeous pixel art to its moody soundtrack. On the thematic level, it explores identity, depression, and perseverance. When it first came out, I played it incessantly. Last month, the developers released a free DLC chapter that got me back into the game and thinking about it again.

Much has already been written and analyzed about Celeste. However, I haven’t seen anyone yet discuss the surprising way its difficulty and its theme intertwine to keep the player in flow. Celeste is punishingly difficult, leading Russ Frushtick from Polygon to label it as “the latest entry in the masocore genre, which consists of games that feel, at first, impossible to finish. These are the games where you die, and die and die again, trying to nail a single stupid jump. Super Meat Boy, Spelunky and Trials are some of the most well-known of these games.” Unlike other entries in this genre though, Celeste doesn’t seem to take glee in mocking the player for their failures in the game. In fact, the themes of Celeste gently push the player to navigate the game’s intense difficulty. The put it in the most straightforward way I can: The themes of perseverance and self-improvement in Celeste encourage the player to stay in flow even when the game’s difficulty would be otherwise kicking them out of flow.

To explain what I mean by this, let’s return to the idea of flow and describe it in more depth. A player is experiencing flow when their skill matches the difficulty of the challenge they’re facing. This relationship is most commonly expressed with a graph that looks something like the following chart which I have shamelessly stolen from Riot Games’ free online game design curriculum URF Academy Online:

The middle part of this chart is what we’ll call the “flow band,” where the player’s skill matches the game’s difficulty. Inside the flow band, the player is engaged and focused on the task at hand. Bad stuff happens both below and above the flow band. When the game’s difficulty is less than player skill, the player becomes bored, and stops playing. Inversely, when the game’s difficulty is too high for the player’s skill, the player becomes frustrated and anxious, causing them to again stop playing.

Celeste lives primarily in the top end of the flow band and the “anxiety” region. Like other impossible platformers such as Super Meatboy, this extreme difficulty drives away some players while encouraging others. While Super Meatboy leans into this difficulty in its aesthetics, using saws, blood splatters, and barren, industrial wastelands to communicate to the player that this is not a game to be taken lightly, Celeste is different. The aesthetics of Celeste just don’t match up with what we’ve come to expect from this genre. This is because Celeste is trying to get across a very particular message.

(Warning: Major spoilers for the plot of Celeste ahead.)

Celeste, on the thematic, story level, is about how Madeline overcomes her inner turmoil. In Chapter 2 of the game, Madeline meets and flees from a dark doppelganger version of herself which fans of the game humorously call “Badeline.” Badeline represents Madeline’s inner insecurities: her anxiety, her depression, and her hatred for herself. In Chapter 3 and Chapter 5, Badeline returns to cause trouble, screwing up her attempts to empathize with other people she meets and forcing her to confront the fact that she always runs away from her problems.

As Madeline climbs higher and higher, the very mountain itself becomes a metaphor for her transformation as a person. Each new advancement up the mountain is both a moment of physical growth and mental/emotional growth. In Chapter 6, when things reach their breaking point for Madeline, Badeline casts her back down to the foot of the mountain, symbolizing that she’s sliding back into her old habits and ways of thinking. After many challenges and a heated chase, Madeline finally confronts her dark self at the end of the chapter, and in a surprising twist, rather than get rid of her, asks her to work together to finish climbing the mountain. When she does this, she gains a new ability, symbolizing that she’s grown and become more competent because she’s accepted the dark part of her. This is a touching portrayal of the difficulty of living with mental illness and insecurity: Madeline, ultimately, can’t outrun her demons, but she can learn how to control them. When Madeline finally reaches the summit, it is not because she’s no longer frustrated, but because she’s learned to not give up and push through her frustration.

Madeline’s frustration with herself, her abilities, and her progress mirror the player’s frustration with themself, their skills at the game, and the speed of their progression. This is an especially powerful version of “ludonarrative harmony,” when the mechanics of a game and the story it is trying to tell reinforce each other.

This ludonarrative harmony has a special effect upon the player’s flow. I experienced this for myself when I played the game’s most difficult level (at least before the recent update), Core C-Side. The final room of this level is a brutal gauntlet containing the mechanics from each other level of the game mixed together to create one final ultimate challenge.

I racked up over 1000 deaths on this room alone. During the weeks that I was attempting to complete this room, many times I thought to myself that I couldn’t do it, and that there was no shame in giving up. However, despite the fact that I am not a completionist by nature (I almost never 100% games), I felt the compulsion to keep going to prove something to myself.

As I died again and again, I found myself reflecting, in the inky black darkness of that final level, of the journey I had taken to that point. Unlocking the C-Side levels involves beating all of the B-side levels, which themselves are nigh-impossible secret unlockable remixes of the game’s normal levels. Before this particular C-side, I had conquered each of the other C-sides in turn, and my deaths for those seven levels alone totaled over 3000. When I considered giving up, I thought about those challenges, and how far I’d come already. Without even realizing I was doing it, I’d stop playing for a second, take deep breaths, and repeat the mantra “You can do this,” to myself, which, although I didn’t remember this at the time, is displayed prominently at the end of the game’s tutorial level.

When I finally dashed into the last of the collectible crystal hearts at the end of that room, I felt a flash of what Madeline must’ve felt when she finally reached the summit of the mountain. I was proud of myself for having stuck it out. I had grown as a player and as a person.

I can confidently say this had everything to do with Celeste’s themes. Although I am not one who quits easily, I’ve reached my breaking point with many games in the past. I never finished Super Meatboy, even though I adored the game, because the levels became so difficult that I eventually got bored of them (don’t get me wrong – Super Meatboy is an incredible game, and I want to return to it one day and finish it). I don’t think I would have stuck with Celeste’s arguably even harder levels if not for the way that the game’s themes set me up to succeed.

To put this in technical terms, the themes of Celeste help keep the player out of the upper portion of the flow graph. For much of my experience of the B-sides and C-sides, I teetered dangerously at the top end of flow band, nearly falling into anxiety and quitting. However, I didn’t stop playing because of that anxiety. Instead, I clung more fiercely to my goals and stuck with the game. I stayed in flow. If this happened for me, I don’t doubt that it must have happened for others as they toughed out the game’s hardest challenges.

There was an interesting secondary effect to all this for me, too. Since I finished that final level, I’ve continued to play the game, gaining a deeper mastery of its mechanics. While I have nowhere near the skill of the game’s top speedrunners, now I can do most of the B-sides and C-sides without too much difficulty. In fact, upon finishing the C-sides, an even more difficult challenge unlocks: a golden berry in each level which can only be collected by completing the level without a single death. To date I’ve collected about half of these, and have no intentions of stopping. And furthermore, when the insane new DLC chapter was released last month, I struggled through it, but ultimately beat it. Once I overcame the hurdle of completing the game, it was so enjoyable to play that I moved on to mastering it. I’m nowhere near there yet, but I don’t think my deep enjoyment of the game could have happened without the subtle nudging of its themes. And as hard as the game is, I keep going. Because I know that I can do this.

In conclusion, flow, difficulty, and theme intertwine in Celeste to create an especially delicious kind of ludonarrative harmony that is enchanting to experience. These three elements kept me engaged with the game’s most difficulty elements long past when I would have otherwise quit, and I highly suspect it did the same for other players, whether they consciously know so or not. Celeste is already highly regarded for many reasons, but I surely believe this should stand among the best of those reasons. This game is a powerful testament to just how much stronger a game gets when its story and mechanics are working in tandem rather than against each other. When these two things are gelling together, games become something more than a way to entertain ourselves and fill our time. They become an art.