One of the main reasons I liked Celeste was that it felt like Knytt Stories But Fast
Redder and VVVVVV are both complete shit but in different ways
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I think a lot of the acceptable boundaries of discourse about games comes down to perceptions of underdog vs overdog. With an absolute overdog like, say, The Last of Us, most people agree (at least on a forum like this one) that it’s open season for whatever criticism anybody wants to make of it, no matter how harsh. Criticism of overdogs is seen as a healthy corrective which will not prevent it from achieving wild market success in any case.
The flip side is that there is a culture of reticence and politeness around underdogs. At the extreme end, none of us are in the habit of trying out a game with 10 downloads on itch.io, and then turning around to brutally mock it online. There was a culture akin to that with somethingawful in the early 2000s, but that died out for good reason. When we play a very rough and obscure game, we either never bring it up if we are truly unable to think of any good in it, or we take on a tone of eclectic enthusiasm and praise its freshness, rawness and authenticity.
Celeste is one of those games in a fuzzy zone of semi-breakout-success, and semi-market-pleasing/semi-creative ambitions, where the vast majority of people still think of it as an underdog, whereas ellaguro who is especially conscious of a vast universe of less successful, more authentic and risk-taking games thinks of it as an overdog.
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.>_>
.<_<
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Actually username, I appreciate how your threads examine these games refreshingly without one of these agendas. I feel like you neither mock them nor force false enthusiasm just because it’s an underdog, but present those games and your reactions to them as they are.
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I just found out about this one-off handheld, but I suspect I will think about it a lot
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I didn’t love Celeste because it didn’t have enough wiggling and curving, putting a valid sequence in for each challenge felt too clean imo. I definitely still liked it and wouldn’t be against someone calling it their favorite, the speed runs are p cool. Also this guy are sick, his favorite platformers are Umihara Kawase and Team Precision Mario Maker courses.
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watching this guy just clip off all the pin headers from that PCB made me wince
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One thing that I eventually realized about Celeste is that these options people praise so much, and the fact that the nontrivial challenges are all optional (which means that the vast majority of the game is optional) hasn’t obviously done that much to diversify the audience of the game. People know a hard platformer when they see one and they also believe that turning on one of the accessibility options would undermine the intended experience and that not going for most of the strawberries would be absurd, even if the game carefully avoids saying so.
People who were already good at platformers mostly like Celeste and people who don’t play a lot of platformers mostly feel it’s not for them. So I feel like the game quietly failed at this well-intended aspiration, and I agree it gets too much credit for it.
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I mean, it got me to play and beat it, and I’m rubbish at most of these sorts of games. I have no patience for a Super Meat Boy but Celeste kept me going, even despite the fact that I was critical of the way that use of any of the assists permanently marked your save as such, which feels punishing when you just want to test out a jump with slomo to see if it’s possible and then do it at full speed.
They eventually patched that but not before rendering the optional content mandatory to get to the anniversary bonus content, which felt a bit like a “fuck you if you didn’t go all the way”
Still my GOTY from 2019 though (it was 2019 right god I still don’t have a relationship with time again)
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Somehow this whole conversation has come together for me to talk about a random itch game no one played, so…
It actually adds accessible precision platformer to its name, that was the main gimmick they went with. How it decides to tackle the issue with accessibility is to give a player four ways to tackle each stage, like so:
You pass each stage by touching each block (they “fill in” after you do so) and being declared victorious the second you accomplish this. The easiest difficulty level requires you to just be near the block for it to be filled in. The middle two are self explanatory. The hardest difficulty makes every block you touch became dangerous to you a few seconds after it is filled in. During the course of the game it doesn’t really care which one you go with, a beaten stage is still beaten. After you beat the game you unlock time trials and playing on anything less than the hardest adds in a time penalty.
Does it work to make it more accessible? I played through every stage except the final multi-stage boss on the hardest setting as I’ve played through all of those Super Meat Boys and Celestes, but I can safely say that it does help. The real question is does it help enough and… I’m not sure. The hardest difficulty makes you do everything in a hurry and lower ones have checkpoints which would help, but a tricky jump is still a tricky jump (the game also has a crouch button only used to set up a long jump which feels more involved mechanically than one would want if this was your goal) and I think it could still trip someone up. Basically I’d say it succeeded in this specific goal but if you are really not good at these games there could still be problems.
…The bigger problem is that the level design just isn’t particularly interesting. I like both precision platformers and minimalistic ones (really I like to run and jump in games) so I was entertained enough burning through this but even if one were waiting for a more accessible game in this vein… I wish that granted one access to something more exciting.
But hey, it’s free and playable in a browser so one can check out the accessibility stuff for themselves. I don’t think it’ll light anyone’s world on fire but it ain’t bad or anything.
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Celeste was a massive success compared to basically every other game like it, and it’s not by any means an underdog given how much its sold. and it is maddening to me that people still treat a game like that like they’re some small indie dev you should have some collective investment in succeeding or whatever. like why should i care about some millionaire indie dev or pretend they’re some sort of underdog! there is such a massive gulf between a Celeste and like… 99% of other things, and yet it is not treated as that way.
also i’m still convinced that the people who really like Celeste are just permanently existing on a totally different plane of reality from me, so i might just have to accept that that is irreconcilable. i don’t like the aesthetics, i find the themes kinda heavy-handed and blah, i don’t really even like how the game feels to play on a mechanical level. oh well.
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FFIV’s window color.
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I think Broco’s point is Celeste slotted easily into the “indie game underdog” label despite obviously never being a true underdog, considering it was a massive financial and critical success immediately on release. The concept of “indie game” has always been, to an extent, a marketing label and conflating these games as Davids to AAA Goliaths is meaningless.
Celeste and Shovel Knight are similar in my mind as I find their critical/financial success was a positive-feedback loop of goodwill. I really don’t think Celeste is so beloved because it’s an underdog game, it’s beloved because it was called beloved on release and it was sincere enough/competent enough/hard-yet-beatable enough for people to buy into that.
I’m not as extreme in disliking Celeste, I did enjoy the platforming physics and found it more fun than most “indie game hard platformers” (though most of these games are nowhere near as hard as they are marketed, considering they never introduce any true risk taking). It is a bit overrated but it’s hard for me to get as worked up about it compared to similar games (Shovel Knight). Celeste’s biggest sin for me was the digital cartoon illustration tumblr character art, which contrasted far too much with the far more effective and abstracted pixel character art.
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I finished Celeste and hearing Reach for the Summit can still make me cry a little bit AND I 100% agree with you, I think it misses the mark here significantly. The middle part of the game is just this messy thing about fighting with yourself, which is something I do all the time but I still couldn’t relate to it. I think it works in the beginning and the end, essentially, and that’s it.
But I do think that it hits the mark in one way, which is that the game doesn’t end when you reconcile all your emotional issues. In fact, it presents you with the longest, most difficult challenge where many games would take the slightly cowardly route and make it a victory lap. The thing that hit me the hardest is that theme of “being an emotionally stable person doesn’t make things easy, it makes things possible. life is still fucking hard regardless.” I liked that.
Anyway the platforming was generally frustrating, especially on a Joycon (goddddd trying to do anything diagonally was a nightmare) and I enjoyed the sense of “oh shit that’s how this works” when I did figure something out, but then executing it over and over kinda sucked.
My boss at the time absolutely loved Celeste, and the additional levels got patched into the game while we were at a retreat so I got to watch him throw himself at that brick wall for an hour straight. The look of concentration and seriousness on his face was unforgettable, and every time he did finally do something challenging I was like, cheering him on and shouting and stuff.
I have extremely mixed feelings about Celeste, is what I’m saying!!!
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also i love shovel knight!! i’m the badguy here okay
it’s not like, i ever wanna play it again or anything but i thought it was a good time. it is absolutely undeserving of all the praise it gets though and i don’t understand why shovel knight is in every indie game and also smash. i hate that.
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It’s a cool, funny character design I think is mostly why
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knytt stories was such a moment
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On my last reread of The Buried Giant the image that stuck with me, for some reason, is the terrifying open plain in the second chapter that must be travelled at exactly noon, the time when demonic forces are minimized and you have the greatest likelihood of an uneventful crossing where you see nothing but grass. I’m wondering what videogames capture that feeling – I feel like horror games lean much more into claustrophobia instead.
I feel like on one level fear of openness has rarely been pursued as a conscious experiential goal, on another level it pervades basically every 3D game starting from Wolfenstein. A narrow forward-facing camera provokes the anxiety that The Buried Giant’s couple face walking in a line in the open, where the one in front feels the need to ritualistically call out “Are you still there?” at regular intervals
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Passing through The Barrens off-peak server hours.
I wish Death Stranding made timefall a bit more random, because moments like the one you’re describing DO happen but only in like a few places. Want like some STALKER-esque mod that makes weather more erratic like Blowouts or Anomalies or monster hordes in that game.
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100% I did not care for the character portraits at all even as I found the general spritework to be effective