Game Debate #186: Celeste

[Reed Rothchild | 9,528]

[WalterWhiteJr. | 1,162]

10/10. Incredible game.

[Brickman | 3,986]

10

Absolutely loved this game. The music is amazing, the level designs are tough but never cheap or broken and the story is really moving. I have read that the story is a reflection of what the developer went through but I think what is so great about it is that people can relate to it in their own way. Definitely one of the best platformers ever made imo.

[RH | 4,903]

It's just one of those games I've seen around for the last several years, but I've not heard anything about it.  I think this was an LRG release, and then it was an early title that they started re-printing and putting in Best Buy, correct?

Anyway, I assume a popular and easily sellable title is the only thing you'd treat that way.  Still, other than seeing brief snippets and seeing it's a a platformer, I don't know anything about it and I'm just not into much of those anymore.

Maybe it's truly remarkable and amazing, but if I'm going to be playing a game like that, I tend to want to keep it old school and I'll play stuff that's SNES aged or older.

EDIT

Cuphead is the only exception, but that's 100% because it looks like an exceptional piece of art.  I've still not touched Cuphead, but it's high up on the list, especially if I can figure out a way to get it to a CRT.

Edited January 11 by RH

[Gloves | 11,778]

Never played, likely never will.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,528]

10 minutes ago, Gloves said:

Never played, likely never will.

People: "10!"

Gloves: "Man, fuck that game."

[Reed Rothchild | 9,528]

I'm thinking 7.5.  But I have to round up or down.

[Gloves | 11,778]

3 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

People: "10!"

Gloves: "Man, fuck that game."

It's just not my kind of game tbh. I got my fill when I 100%'ed Super Meat Boy when that came out all those years ago. Recognizing of course this isn't a SMB clone or anything, but it's similar and it's just hard for me to want more of that.

[Gaia Gensouki | 1,073]

I've heard lots of good things about this game and would like to try it out at some point, but the high difficulty is exactly what turns me off from this game and why I constantly keep postponing playing this game.

[Brickman | 3,986]

6 minutes ago, Gaia Gensouki said:

I've heard lots of good things about this game and would like to try it out at some point, but the high difficulty is exactly what turns me off from this game and why I constantly keep postponing playing this game.

It isn’t as hard as people make it out to be. It’s no harder than a decent NES platformer. Also there’s a side A and side B level. You can just finish the side A and get the full experience, side B is for those who want to really push themselves.

[Webhead123 | 675]

48 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

I'm thinking 7.5.  But I have to round up or down.

This was actually my gut rating but I decided to round it down to a 7.

It has a lot of admirable qualities. The pixel art and overall graphic presentation, the music, even the characters are all good. It's in the genre of what I call "death cycle platformers", like Super Meat Boy, where the object is to die repeatedly learning the pattern of each area until you finally make it through by finding a perfect rhythm.

Also like Super Meat Boy, I've just learned that I enjoy these kinds of experiences for the first half of the game or so and by the second half, the memorization demand combined with the increasingly absurd twitch-response requirement just makes me ready to be done with it. With Celeste, I actually made it about 80% of the way through...more than I expected...but I will admit that I cheesed my way through the final stretch of the game, as I was just not interested in investing the hundreds of deaths it was going to require to finish the thing. When areas started to take a dozen deaths or more to figure out, I couldn't be bothered.

So, Celeste was a game that I can understand why someone might rate it as one of the greatest platformers of all time...but personally, although I enjoyed and appreciated it, it's not a game (or even a genre of game) that I'm very interested in revisiting.

[wongojack | 214]

I played this a number of years ago.  I was mildly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Here's what I wrote about it in 2020:

Celeste (XBox One) - I've described this before as a series of enjoyable beatings.  I played through each of the initial levels and the epilogue at least once.  I collected 4 of the crystal hearts which are kind of like hidden optional prizes in each level.  I consider myself to be done with the game, BUT is it "Beaten?"  Not really.  This game now has almost triple the original content thanks to a recent free DLC called "Farewell."  I tried some of the Farewell content and it . . . beat me - LOL.  I may go back to Celeste at some point, but I'm definitely done with it for a while.

I never went back, but I do think about the game occasionally and my memories of it are all positive.  I'm going with an 8 on this poll.

[LHCGreg | 111]

9/10, great game. The strawberries, B sides, C sides, Farewell, and golden strawberries let you take the difficulty as far as you want.

 

[AstralSoul | 502]

I thought it was overrated. People acted like it was the second coming of Jesus. Also it's not as hard as people say. You restart at the beginning of a screen when you die and you get unlimited tries. It would be very hard if you started further back every death or had limited lives. Like imagine you respawned 5 feet from the last spot you died and could do that infinitely, imagine that in any game you think is ridiculously hard. It makes it a hell of a lot easier. I thought the game was ugly but I'm also so over the retro pixel art movement. It's one thing to make beautiful pixel art but they intentionally make it look like an Atari game. The music was good though. 6/10

[RegularGuyGamer | 2,013]

4 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said:

I'm thinking 7.5.  But I have to round up or down.

I rounded up. It's easy to recommend and actually delivered on he hype. Nothing wrong with this game for me. I enjoyed the whole way through and the story was actually a story to tell. Gameplay was tight but i would recommend it on a console that has a dpad.

[sp1nz | 612]

One of the better 2D platformers in the last 20 years, but not quite at the status of "one of my favorite" games ever on this scale, so 9/10.

Fresh mechanic mixture of 8 direction air dashing and stamina-based wall climb. Masterclass in level design, mechanics allow for high speed movement, good level gimmicks that keep the gameplay fresh, fun collectibles, graphics have distinctive feel to them, good story and characters, difficulty can be tuned to be easiest shit ever with assists or hard deathless runs with optional golden berries. It's the full package for someone looking for a great platformer. Also really shows how some people are not in the indie space, especially on PC when they don't know about this yet, just saying.

[koifish | 556]

5 hours ago, Gloves said:

It's just not my kind of game tbh. I got my fill when I 100%'ed Super Meat Boy when that came out all those years ago. Recognizing of course this isn't a SMB clone or anything, but it's similar and it's just hard for me to want more of that.

Yeah, I don't fully remember, but this is basically another platformer with double jump and wall jump, right? There were so many of them in the 2000s that I'm pretty sure "platformer with double jump and wall jump" was a joke name of one of them. I'm in the same position, I've played too many platformers to want one right now. Maybe a historically noteworthy one, but not just one that happens to be popular.

 

55 minutes ago, sp1nz said:

Also really shows how some people are not in the indie space, especially on PC when they don't know about this yet, just saying.

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you explain this?

[sp1nz | 612]

13 minutes ago, koifish said:

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you explain this?

1 hour ago, sp1nz said:

Also really shows how some people are not in the indie space, especially on PC when they don't know about this yet, just saying.

It's one of the most known/popular games in the spaces I'm in, so when people say they've heard about it for being a Switch game or have just heard about it in passing it just throws me for a loop. Like in my mind it's maybe one step removed from Cuphead's popularity as an indie game. Maybe that part of my comment was stupid but I just got that air from couple comments in the thread already and felt like putting it out there.

Anyway appreciate anyone's opinion/experience being different than mine.

Edited January 12 by sp1nz

[Gloves | 11,778]

Just now, sp1nz said:

It's one of the most known/popular games in the spaces I'm in, so when people say they've heard about it for being a Switch game or have just heard about it in passing it just throws me for a loop. Like in my mind it's maybe one step removed from Cuphead's popularity as an indie game. Maybe my interjection was stupid but I just got that air from couple comments in the thread already and felt like putting it out there.

Anyway appreciate anyone's opinion/experience being different than mine.

Not sure if you're referring to my comments (I assume not) but I do want to say I am very familiar with Celeste. I simply haven't played it and have no desire to do so.

[sp1nz | 612]

9 minutes ago, Gloves said:

Not sure if you're referring to my comments (I assume not) but I do want to say I am very familiar with Celeste. I simply haven't played it and have no desire to do so.

Not at all directed to you, mainly meant RH with the "It's just one of those games I've seen around for the last several years, but I've not heard anything about it.  I think this was an LRG release" and maybe sprinkled in some other comments. I'm not trying to paint people who don't know x thing in a negative light, just expressing my surprise/shock at the finding. I guess in general looking at retrohead forumers talking you could say that large parts of gaming sphere, especially in the current day, don't really exist to them, so in that sense it's not even surprising.

EDIT: I seem to have pulled the "Switch game" out of my ass in the context of this thread, when I should've said the "LRG game".

Edited January 12 by sp1nz

[Brickman | 3,986]

4 minutes ago, sp1nz said:

Not at all directed to you, mainly meant RH with the "It's just one of those games I've seen around for the last several years, but I've not heard anything about it.  I think this was an LRG release" and maybe sprinkled in some other comments. I'm not trying to paint people who don't know x thing in a negative light, just expressing my surprise/shock at the finding. I guess in general looking at retrohead forumers talking you could say that large parts of gaming sphere, especially in the current day, don't really exist to them, so in that sense it's not even surprising I guess.

EDIT: I guess I pulled the "Switch" game out of my ass, when I guess I was reacting to the "LRG" game part.

I'm honestly surprised the game even got this many comments. I know Reed generally steers away from putting up games like this because of the really low turn out in the past, so it's good to see he gave an indie another go.

This place is definitely not up to date on indies or modern gaming so you have to take what people say about games like this with a grain of salt. Come here for the retro game discussions, but definitely don't come here for the opinions of modern and indie games 

[OptOut | 8,884]

Is this the one with the owl-person? 

[sp1nz | 612]

Just now, Brickman said:

I'm honestly surprised the game even got this many comments. I know Reed generally steers away from putting up games like this because of the really low turn out in the past, so it's good to see he gave an indie another go.

This place is definitely not up to date on indies or modern gaming so you have to take what people say about games like this with a grain of salt. Come here for the retro game discussions, but definitely don't come here for the opinions of modern and indie games 

Yeah, indeed. Anyway on Steam platform alone Celeste has 78438 reviews and Cuphead has 135731 reviews. Original Super Meat Boy has 24720. Now how you want to interpret any of that is up in the air, but it's certainly no "unknown" game.

Thinking more about it, I think it's THE platformer to play since Super Meat Boy for indies. Of course it won't be everyone's cup of tea in any case.

[Gloves | 11,778]

11 minutes ago, OptOut said:

Is this the one with the owl-person? 

I think you're referring to the aptly named "Owlboy" lol.

[Brickman | 3,986]

37 minutes ago, koifish said:

There were so many of them in the 2000s that I'm pretty sure "platformer with double jump and wall jump" was a joke name of one of them.

Not sure what you mean by this. We're still in the 2000's  unless you mean early 2000's which wouldn't be right because this game was released in 2018. Also the game has more actions than double jump and wall jump. And the controls are extremely tight, probably some of the best I've ever experienced in platforming.

What made this game so good is that the story really integrated well with the platforming. All those deaths really made me feel like I was struggling climbing the mountain with Madeline as opposed to the very generic story in past platformers.

If people aren't into platformers then that's fair enough, they won't enjoy this game at all. But anyone who loves platformer games like SMB, Ninja Gaiden, Donkey Kong Country,  Battletoads etc. they definitely owe it to themselves to give this game a go. It can be a moderate level difficulty platformer all the way up to one of the most difficult platformers ever made depending how deep you want to get in to the game.