A bunch of us on GYPT have been mentioned they’re playing this, might be worth its own thread. It’s a platformer by the creator of Towerfall with impeccable pixel art, animation design, fast-loop challenges and a really charming and sympathetic bunch of characters. The difficulty ranges from ~SMB3 for the mandatory content to median IWBTG fangame for the late postgame, and it comes largely from complex input sequences as opposed to narrow timing windows (the timings and hitboxes are always more generous than they appear).
Here’s a video of one of the areas I enjoyed most in the game. I love those dream blocks. They have a bit of a Sonic 2 flavor to them, but you also can press jump or grip buttons when exiting to alter your trajectory coming out.
Whoa, I had no idea there were C-sides. I did the postgame level where you need 4 hearts and saw the B-side for it needed more and figured that’d be it.
I’m sort of on the fence about whether I want to get this or not…
How does this compare to something like Super Meat Boy? I was able to appreciate that game for what it was, but I think when I got to the first boss I decided I got the point and stopped playing.
I’m only on chapter 3 (first run) so far but it’s a lot, lot more forgiving* than Meat Boy.
*Forgiving might not be the right word. It’s still difficult but it’s not setting out to kick you and keep you down. It’s a lot more invested in telling a story than Meat Boy, which was mainly just a series of hardcore challenges. There’s a series of hardcore challenges here, as well, but it eases you into them more as you go along.
Super Meat Boy’s almost 10 years old now and it’s pretty ugly, poorly balanced and one-dimensional compared to this. I mean, I enjoyed Super Meat Boy, it was groundbreaking and still very playable, so I don’t want to slam it too hard, but it was the first new-wave platformer and not really representative of the experience you’ll get here.
In Celeste the art is much better, the controls are more complex, the timing windows are more forgiving, the animation has more crunch, there are more and better level-specific gimmicks, there’s occasional elements of exploration and puzzles, the savepoint length is more consistent, there’s a charming plot, and all actually difficult content is bracketed off into optional/postgame so you can dip and out of it.
Celeste is actually much more similar to (but also better than) McMillen’s 2017 secrets-filled platformer The End is Nigh. McMillen also converged on the structure of a leisurely paced main game where you search for secrets largely hidden behind screen edges, and a punishing and linear postgame.
If there’s one place where I’m thinking Celeste innovates it’s in its framing of difficulty. There’s been this dichotomy where a game like Mario 3D World, even though it does get very tough, presents itself as childlike and accessible, and on the other hand you have games like Meatboy and Dark Souls that gleefully declare they’ll punish the player. The truth is the actual difficulty delta behind the presentation has never been that wide.
Celeste found a synthesis – videogame difficulty is a self-imposed challenge you can take on willingly when you’re relaxed but dip out of when you’re not feeling up to it, it’s a source of satisfaction and personal growth. It’s a game about sympathy and support for the struggling, and about determination.
The one slightly off-key note there is how much Celeste constantly shoves death count statistics in your face though. There’s a tip text that I presume declares the designer intent behind that: it says like “be proud of your death count, it shows how much you’ve learned”. But I fail to be proud of it and it’s mostly given me opportunities to feel a little bad.
Whenever I go back into a level to find more strawberries or gems, it’s annoying to watch the death count tick up. And I was proud of my Summit B-side completion and initially OK about my ~1500 death count on it given it’s arguably the game’s ultimate challenge. Until I saw some streamers who beat it in less than 500, at which point I did feel very mediocre at videogames (likely unfair to myself because these are literally professionals and I might still be in the top decile of skill, but that’s the problem with presenting failure statistics).
Yep, the C-sides are unlocked by beating Core B-side. It’s a generous little bonus right when you believe you’ve 100%ed the game. The C-sides are short, and they aren’t much harder than the B-sides on a per-platforming-element basis, but their gimmick is that their final savepoint is twice as long as usual.
Though, I think it’s pretty dumb that they’re locked behind 100% heart completion which means you’ll need to solve “puzzles” including this little beauty:
This would be cute as an easter egg but not as a content unlock requirement. When you see this you’ll either instantly know how to solve it (I did) or you’ll never figure it out. There’s nothing in Fez as gimmicky as this.
The pacing in this game is great as well. It’s really adept at doing the setup, challenge, denouement thing on a screen to screen basis, where you learn how to do something, get challenged at your new skill, then have a nice easy thing to feel accomplished with. But it also has really good pacing from level to level, as it seems to alternate between more linear/physically difficult levels and more exploratory/puzzle levels.
I do hate the death count thing too, it seems counter to the game’s otherwise empathetic and kind nature. It feels like a leftover from masocore games.
I assume everyone found this but I really liked the Pico 8 version of Celeste you can find in the ghost hotel. It’s pretty dang hard, and it’s a nice window into what this game could have been (maybe a little too rigorous).
Been taking it slowly on this, but I’ll probably finish it this weekend, then maybe start on the B Sides. I don’t think I’ll 100% it but I do enjoy the act of moving in this game, which is usually enough to propel me into the postgame at least a little bit.
Beat Summit B-Side last night! Holy guacamole that was hard. The new mechanic introduced all the way at the end was… very technical, to say the least.
The observation some have made ITT about how the frame/pixel windows are actually bigger than you think / bigger than similar games is VERY true. I’m loving all of my saved replays because it always looks about 5x as hard as it actually is.
I found out from browsing the Steam achievements page that there’s another hidden challenge, it’s to obtain a so-called “1UP”. Apparently you get this by resolving 6 strawberries at the same time, i.e. drag them behind you without pausing on safe ground until you pick up the 6th. Then the fake “score” jingles up to 1UP in another Mario reference. I wonder where is the best spot in the game to try this… a particularly cool thing about this challenge is the routing/exploration creativity.
Another thing is there’s no achievement for golden strawberries, thank god. That’s the only actually masochistic challenge in the game. Instead you can use golden strawberries to paper over any regular strawberries you didn’t find to reach 175, which is the max achievement level.
The ending tiers are really cute. They weren’t kidding about strawberries being there to impress your friends:
You need to finish Core B-side before they become available. Then each stage you’ve completed has a golden strawberry at the beginning of it. To resolve it, you have to complete the entire stage deathless (it follows you around the entire time).
I believe nobody has yet obtained the Summit B-side golden strawberry and it might be months before anybody succeeds.
