Game details Developer: Matt Thorson and Noel Berry

Publisher: MattMakesGames

Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, Switch, PS4, Xbox One

Release Date: January 25, 2018

ESRB Rating: E for Everyone

Price: $20

Links: Steam | Itch.io | Official site Matt Thorson and Noel Berry: MattMakesGames: Windows, Mac, Linux, Switch, PS4, Xbox OneJanuary 25, 2018E for Everyone: $20

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a quirky, pixellated video game breathes new life into the Mario-like side-scroller genre. Or, well, those games used to breathe life, before they became commonplace. Super Meat Boy set this kind of resurgence into motion nearly a decade ago. That's a long time in side-scrolling years.

A peek at this week's Celeste—which favors pixellated designs and squishy, bouncy characters—could make any skeptical passerby sigh in that "Gosh, another one of these?" way. I get that.

But I insist there's something here. In the past few years, we've seen a few super-beautiful, far-from-pixellated platformers emerge with serious fans. Cuphead made a huge splash in 2017 by emphasizing brutal difficulty and hand-drawn beauty. Fans of 2014's Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze swear by its breadth and production values. And 2015's Ori and the Blind Forest injected gorgeous designs and wild platforming maneuvers into a "Metroidvania" adventure.

Celeste doesn't look much like those three games, but its brilliance comes from borrowing their best ideas—and boost-leaping past their pitfalls—to deliver the most intense, memorable, and satisfying platformer yet released in the 2010s. Put Celeste at the top of your side-scrolling shelf, right next to Super Meat Boy and Yoshi's Island.

Tower... climb?













If Celeste looks familiar, that's because its creators have cut their teeth on some serious pixel-art games before, particularly Towerfall. (We love Towerfall.) On its face, Celeste looks and feels similar to Towerfall, as if retooled as a solo game. Your character design almost looks lifted from Towerfall, as is her default move suite: running, jumping, wall-jumping, wall-climbing, and a cardinal-direction "air-dash."

In the bow-and-arrow combat of Towerfall, this air-dash is used primarily to dodge attacks. Celeste doesn't have any combat, however. As a result, the air-dash becomes something else entirely.

You control an unnamed young woman (if left unnamed, she's called Madeline) on her unexplained quest to scale a massive Canadian mountain. A story eventually plays out as Madeline encounters a friendly fellow climber, a strange old lady, and a few mysterious locals. Before the conversations pick up in length and depth, there's the matter of climbing. Just climb.

The game's opening challenges are simple enough. Enter a room, use the air-dash to effectively "double jump" to higher platforms, and go through an opening at the top-right of the screen to enter the next room. Almost immediately, Celeste teases you with its common "strawberry" collectibles, which are always placed in tricky spots to jump, wall-hop, and air-dash toward. (What's more, you don't get to "claim" the fruit until you finish a series of jumps and climbs and land safely on your feet.) They gently goad you into flexing your air-dash muscles, though the game makes abundantly clear that these collectibles don't affect your progress or unlock anything.

Try before you buy Celeste began life as a game-jam project over a year ago, and the developers made that version Celeste began life as a game-jam project over a year ago, and the developers made that version available to play in your Web browser . This version demonstrates the puzzle potential of the air-dash mechanic, but it's definitely missing the twists and level-design diversity of the final game.

But nobody who plays these types of games ignores collectible shinies, a fact that Celeste is very appreciative of. Forget the collect-a-thon bloat of series like Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie. There are truly only two types of collectibles in this game: strawberries, which each world hides roughly 20-25 of, and a very small number of super-secret "hearts," which require clever methods, movement, and sleuthing to uncover. Celeste keeps it simple.

More importantly, the game places these collectibles around its world to tease out something I've encountered in my own real-world hiking and climbing experiences—that the most satisfying traversal comes from a nicely paced mix of tricky-but-doable grabs and "gosh, I am so close" challenges. The satisfaction of picking up another strawberry in Celeste doesn't come from ratcheting your count one higher; it's in stopping once you've landed safely and pocketed the fruit, then looking at the screen to examine the jumps and maneuvers needed to snag it. Like, look at that. Look at what I just accomplished right there.

But simply air-dashing around a bunch of clever corridors wouldn't cut it, which brings us to Celeste's other genius: putting Madeline's increased powers and maneuvers in the game world, not in her required button layout. Each world introduces at least one new thing that Madeline can touch or manipulate whilst climbing, jumping, and air-dashing. The first is a green, mid-air gem that refreshes her air-dash ability; normally you only get to air-dash once per jump, with the ability resetting whenever you land. But if you can jump-and-dash all the way across the screen to a green gem, you can keep that single jump going longer.

Scaling past its platforming peers











As Madeline advances, these new elements increase in drastic fashion. A series of otherworldly blocks soon appear, which you can't walk through—but if you air-dash into them, you zip through them in a straight line, which can either quickly propel you where you're supposed to go or send you directly to your death. (Either way, your air-dash power resets when you burst out from the other side.)

Meanwhile, floating red spheres will fling Madeline in a rapid, one-way line if she touches them. She can air-dash out of the line at any time (and will need to escape from it at precise moments for harder challenges), while yellow feathers let her float in whatever direction she wants for a limited time.

Those are but a few of the in-the-world objects that do something really neat: they take the very cool, high-speed superpowers of a game like Ori and the Blind Forest and distill them in a way that removes the backtracking, item collection, level-up system, and controller complication of that game. Players walk into challenge rooms using only one joystick and two buttons, and the room itself feeds all of the exotic complication—and exhilarating "I can't believe I pulled that off" moments.

Throughout my gameplay, I couldn't help but think back to Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, a platformer that fans argue wasn't received as warmly as it deserved when it landed on the Wii U in 2014. I like DKC:TF as a beautiful fulfillment of that series' momentum-heavy exploration, but I am far more smitten by how Celeste lets players walk into a challenging room, size up its insanity, and then manage a series of fast jumps, dashes, warps, and more. I'd start exploring (and dying many times) in a Celeste room, come to grips with how the game wanted me to beat it, then find the right pattern of timing and movement to pull it off—which is a very different kind of "momentum" than the almost automatic roll-and-react movement of DKC.

Somewhat related is my appreciation of Celeste's pixel art style, which players will surely differ on. For my money, the frame- and pixel-perfect movement tech of Celeste lives and dies by reading its large, bold pixels, typically offset in clear, colorful fashion by a variety of game worlds. A tough-as-nails boss-rush platformer like last year's Cuphead can work with expressive, musical art and design, but I only needed about 10 minutes with Celeste to appreciate—and express gratitude for—how the latter uses meaty, chunky pixels for equal parts utility and expression.

You need this kind of art style to believe in its movement tech, and yet the design team at MattMakesGames still infuses so much personality into these blocky forms—whether by animation, by wild screen-filling effects, or by incredibly touching storytelling—that it begins to creep up through your travels in appreciably organic ways.

Nice view up here

Each world in Celeste is made up of roughly 100 rooms, and its seven primary worlds will take a relatively skilled player no less than 30 minutes each to understand and master, should you opt to collect some, but not all, of the worlds' toughest strawberries. (Related: the gorgeous soundtrack, which combines the classical beauty of Final Fantasy VI with the big-beat oomph of Mo'Wax Records, is particularly good at keeping players engaged as they die upwards of 250 times per half-hour world.) Unlockable "B-side" variations of each world add another slate of challenges, and these crank the difficulty and insanity up, should you be that guy at the virtual climbing gym who craves nothing less than a "level 9" Celeste wall. (I'm nowhere near beating all of the B-sides. They're insane.)

Super-hard platformers have exploded in recent years, particularly ones made by enthusiasts using simple toolsets (or Super Mario Maker) for the sake of torturous Twitch and GamesDoneQuick runs. I would argue that sheer brutality is not a suitable measure of quality—and that Celeste understands this in much the same way that Super Meat Boy did when it first blew us all away in 2010.

Celeste does so many amazing things. It organically teaches players while cleverly inserting new game-changing powers into its worlds. It gives players breathing room so that they can play however they want, all while choreographing some of the most memorable platforming sequences I've ever played. It pays homage to classic, tough-as-nails platformers while climbing its own unique path.

Celeste left me breathless at the top of its incredible mountain. I love the view from up here. C'mon and join me.

The good

Side-scrolling, Mario-style gaming hasn't felt so simultaneously familiar and refreshing in years.

A simple control suite is bolstered by wild twists built into the game's surreal worlds.

Pixel art makes frame-perfect jumps possible, yet looks gorgeous and has great design variety.

Take the tricky-yet-breezy route if you want. The game is fun no matter how hard a path you opt for.

The bad

Normally, I'd say "it's not long enough" here, but the "B-sides" mode adds a ton of brutally hard levels, should you feel like the five-hour campaign is lacking.

The ugly

The screams you may utter after failing many of the game's "gosh I was so close" challenges.

Verdict: Buy. Celeste is the first must-own single-player game of 2018.