Celeste (

2018

)

For me, a video game can only attain perfection when all its pieces, story, characters, game-play mechanics, music, align into a coherent whole. A game can have flawless controls, excellent level design, and funky-ass music, but these individual virtues do not necessarily mean that everything is going to gel together into a coherent whole. If you take a game that is basically Super Mario Brothers [1985] in tone and style, and then cram in a story straight out Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas [2004] you're going to get something that is a total mess. In less extreme example though, the difference between a good game, like Mass Effect 2 [2010] and a perfect game like Dark Souls [2011] can then be maddening fine. Both have exciting, challenging combat (in Mass Effect's case, only when you crank up the difficulty but still), both are filled with rich characters, and both have a compelling plot. The difference is that Mass Effect 2 [2010] feels like a collection of nice things put in an attractive package, while Dark Souls [2011] feels like a living breathing world. Even the very mechanics of death and checkpoints are incorporated into the setting, giving the game a feeling of completeness. I preface this review with all of this because I want anyone reading this to understand what it is that I'm looking for in a game, and why I found Celeste (FYI it's not based off of those little microwavable pizzas) so infuriating. It is a game so agonizingly close to perfection that the ways it falls short are all the more obnoxious as a result.

But before we tuck into the game's problems, let's look at what it gets right. Celeste is a tough-as-nails, cartoony platformer done up in gorgeous pixel art graphics. The environments are lovely, with each level feeling distinct from all the others, despite the whole game taking place on a single mountain (take note Ori and the Blind Forest [2015]). Indeed, for the final level, the player will have to traverses through a brief segment done in the style of each area again before continuing to the top, and even here when they are presented next to one another in rapid succession, the different environment types do not blend together. Each beautiful environment is full of bottomless pits, spikes, and other level specific hazards, all of which will kill you in a single hit. To get past these death traps, the player has only a few basic skills to rely on, a normal jump, the ability to grab onto ledges and climb for a limited amount of time, and an air-dash double-jump that can be used once before touching the ground. The controls are tight and responsive, though on the switch's tiny, toy-like controller it's pretty common to fuck-up a diagonal dash and go vertical instead. I imagine people using normal controllers, or those who are using a pair of tiny doll-like hands themselves will have less of an issue with this. The music is upbeat, catchy and revolves around a small number of musical motifs that are repeated with different variations throughout the different levels, which makes each level feel totally distinct yet part of a larger whole.

The player takes the role of Madeline, a young woman (though she is drawn, voiced, and usually talks like she's about 8 years old) who suffers from some sort of anxiety disorder. One day, she arbitrarily decides she has to climb Celeste Mountain, a strange place said to have unusual properties. Shortly after starting her journey though, she encounters a magic mirror in a dream and her personality disorder manifests itself as a physical entity, called Badeline (sigh, now is a good time to mention that humor is not among this game's strong suits). Badeline tells Madeline to give up on her dream of climbing the mountain and crawl back into her comfort zone, and when Madeline doesn't listen Badeline starts throwing more and more obstacles in her way. At first, Madeline thinks she can overcome, or destroy her evil doppelganger, but that is not really how mental illness works. Instead, her catharsis comes from working with Badeline, accepting her faults and striving to holistically improve herself. It's a perfectly unobjectionable message for a game to have, though it does veer perilously close to the realm of after-school special preaching.

The game is a bit crazy when it comes to the bonus objectives, and consequently, if you're the type that has to 100% every game you get, you might want to avoid Celeste. Each level has a bunch of strawberries, and collecting more of them gives you a subtly different ending. These are usually rewarded for completing extra platforming challenges and are usually a lot of fun to get. Then there's the tape decks, each of which unlocks a B-side bonus version of the level you complete, beat all the B-sides and you'll open up the C-sides. The B-sides are ridiculously difficult (we're talking like a couple hundred deaths to complete even the easiest one), and despite sinking over 15 hours into this game I never even saw a C-side, so I can only imagine they are nearly impossible to do. Then there's the bonus level, the Heart of the Mountain, which is unlocked if you collect a certain number of hearts, some of which are hidden in the levels and some of which are rewards for completing the B-sides (and good fucking luck finding the hidden ones without a guide). Finally, for the man who absolutely must do everything, there's a golden strawberry for completing a level (or B-side, or C-side[!?]) without dying once. All this adds tremendous replay value to a game that is already on the healthy side for an indie platformer. So, if Celeste is your jam you'll have plenty of reasons to keep playing it.

Celeste wants nothing so much as to be a warmer, fuzzier version of Super Meat Boy [2010], a game which does possess that elusive quality of perfection I mentioned in my introduction. The only problem is that Super Meat Boy's gameplay is informed, to no small part, by its edgy/juvenile sense of humor. It is a game that sprung from the early 2000s era of Newgrounds, an environment that I have a great deal of nostalgia for myself. For those who didn't have the good fortune to be a teen-aged boy in the early 2000s, Newgrounds was a place where amateur cartoonists shared flash animated with one another. Given that these cartoons were made almost exclusively by boys and very young men, the site was rife with ludicrous violence, scatological humor, and crude sexuality. You could unwind from a stressful day at middle school by putting Osama bin Laden in a blender, or while away the hours with a shockingly tasteless school shooter sim made in the aftermath of Columbine. The whole site was a rich kaleidoscope of colors from blood red to poop brown. It was this environment that seasoned Super Meat Boy's creator, Edmund McMillen, hell the original Meat Boy game was released as a Flash game on Newgrounds. Super Meat Boy [2010] is a game where the player will die countless times in a number of horrific fashions. Hell, you'll probably lose track of how many times the player character is reduced to bloody chunks wells before the end of the first world. It's a game where if you are ground up by a buzzsaw when you reload the level to try again you'll see the gore from your last attempt staining the blades. But just like on Newgrounds, death is never a tragedy, it's a gag that you're supposed to laugh off and then immediately try again. Hell, you're rewarded for finishing the level is a supercut showing all the dozens of ways you died clearing it.

So when Celeste tries to take out the juvenile humor of Super Meat Boy [2010] and tries instead to tell a serious story about mental illness, it creates a tension within the work. How am I supposed to empathize and care about Madeline if I kill her a couple hundred times each level? There is a troubling dissonance between the cut-scenes and the levels that surround them, making the game feel like it was cobble together rather than informed by its component parts. It doesn't help that Celeste has ditched the Newgrounds styles in favor of a particular loathsome Canadian aesthetic that combines bright colors, lame jokes, serious topics, and pervasive political correctness that I find, personally, repulsive. For those of you unaware of this style just pick up a random selection of contemporary Marvel comics, Squirrel Girl in particular, and you'll see numerous examples. I can never figure out if this stuff is intended as a means of indoctrinating slow-witted children, or if it only appeals to adults whose total engagement of art consists of watching Disney Channel sitcoms and after-school specials. It's just unbearably saccharine and feels totally out of place telling the serious story of someone learning to live with their mental illness. Mental illness is not all grimdark misery, but to make such a sugary game about such a serious subject just feel wrong to me. It doesn't help that I find it flat out tiresome and pedantic at times, like I'm being lectured on accepting my own mental disabilities, rather than unwinding with a game. Still, this doesn't mean Celeste is a worthless game, far from it, I'd just advise you to skip through all the cut-scenes and ignore the story as much as possible.