On January 25th my most anticipated Y8 game of 2018 was released - the indie platformer Celeste. My expectations were related to the personality of the main developer - this is Canadian Matt Thorson, who, together with Alec Holovka, developed TowerFall, a game about a shootout of tiny pixel archers. TowerFall is one of the best multiplayer retro games of all time, but Thorson's new game has no multiplayer at all! What did this incredibly talented designer manage to achieve, using the same old-school arcade principles as a basis, but this time trying to tell with their help a story with plot and dialogue?
At Celeste, Thorson and his new small team are working on a theme that's perfect for platformers and video games in general, but rarely seen in games. This is an ascent, a continuous assault on one giant mountain.
Interestingly, mountaineering as the main driving force is used only by primitive arcade games like Ice Climber and Doodle Jump. Well, and quite really frank thrash in the spirit of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.
At the same time, the opposite idea - penetration underground - is one of the most popular topics in modern indie because of Spelunky and her countless imitators. Celeste was very warmly received by Western critics - maybe this is the first swallow in a whole new subgenre of indie climbing games?
Celeste uses the same pixel art and retro music (and even retro controls) as TowerFall: Ascension, while taking its subject matter seriously. Mount Celeste, on which the main character climbs throughout the game, serves as the source of the usual arcade misfortunes: ice, wind, landslides. But Thorson is once again incorporating physical details into the game that no one has ever paid attention to in video games.
If you are not familiar with Matt's previous game: in TowerFall, you could shoot a headgear off your opponent with a bow shot and pin it to the wall, or shoot an arrow vertically upwards only so that it fell back with its tip down and pierced your skull.
In Celeste, there are no bows or arrows, but there is an opportunity to cling to and hang from steep cliffs. If you hang for too long, the heroine's strength will run out, and she will fall. We've seen this in a lot of video games - but, as far as I know, only in Celeste these forces are expended at different rates if the heroine is hanging motionless or trying to climb up a wall. You can hang in place for a very long time - but if you try to pull yourself up, you break down almost immediately.
There is no particular realism here - the heroine's powers are instantly restored, as soon as she touches any horizontal surface. But in order to draw attention to such non-obvious details and so integrate them into arcade gameplay, the author had to at least sign up for the rock-climbing section and try to hang himself on a vertical surface.
However, the higher we move up the mountainside, the less attention is paid to rock climbing in Celeste (although, in my opinion, this is the most original and interesting mechanics of the game) and more - to ordinary jumps and dashes borrowed from TowerFall, dashes in the air for a certain distance. Here Thornson also found a very elegant solution. Do you still have dash - a question of life and death, which in Celeste can always be answered by the color of the heroine's hair. If he is red, there is a dash in stock. If it is blue, then all that remains is to jump and pull up, or, most likely, to break down and fall.
You will have to die a lot and often in Celeste - in this regard, the game most of all resembles Super Meat Boy and The End Is Nigh, although the basic mechanics here are not as hardcore as in the merciless masterpieces of Edmund McMillen. As I mentioned in the short "Essentials" by Celeste , the player chooses his own path through each screen: easy or difficult. Jumping through all of the Celeste levels is as easy as navigating the first 3-5 worlds of any early Super Mario Bros.
On a difficult route, with the collection of absurdly inappropriate strawberries cleverly scattered over the levels, the number of deaths in some rooms goes by hundreds, and in others - by thousands. Moreover, in the comments on the loading screen, the developer admits with disarming sincerity that picking strawberries will give you nothing but the admiration of your friends, and explains that a counter with a frightening number of deaths should be proud of.
The strawberry picking mechanic is clearly borrowed from McMillen's games (remember the patches in Meat Boy and the black blots in The End is Nigh?), But there your hard labor at least opened up new levels and secrets, whereas in Celeste you are told at the very beginning, that it will bring nothing but personal satisfaction. In general, everything is like climbing a real hill.
Also, in the spirit of McMillen, the difficulty of any level can be multiplied by finding a certain object (in Celeste - a tape cassette) and entering the familiar stage from the other, "dark" side, There are no favors for the player: it is not enough just to be able to use dash ... the levels need to be completed flying from one recovery point to another without touching the ground at all. There is also an indispensable super-complicated retro-mini-arcade game (clearly an early prototype of Celeste) on an old computer found in the game.
But if ideologically we have a slightly diluted McMillen, then in terms of design and level design, this is one hundred percent Thornson. There is no mitboy minimalism here - only luxurious, colorful pixel art, scrolling screens and backgrounds, gorgeous animation of the smallest actions. This is the elaboration of the picture and the quality of the TowerFall mechanics, brought to an even higher level, and in a couple of places even elevated to the absolute. At one of the Celeste levels, the action unfolds against the backdrop of the setting (as far as I understand) sun, floating and glowing from the setting of clouds, while in the foreground, under a strong wind, tattered pennants and the occasional Canadian flag are desperately flapping on high mountain slopes.
It is so inconceivable, painfully beautiful, and all these views open up before you so suddenly that Celeste evokes sensations that no game with retro graphics has stirred in your soul before: tears of admiration come to your eyes.
In my opinion, this level - it is called Golden Ridge - is the highest point in the development of pixel art, it is impossible to draw better, richer and more dynamically purely physically. For the sake of this stage alone, it was worth first inventing and developing video games, and then unscrewing them back to deliberate pixel primitiveness, this is an independent work of art, at least visually. But you can also jump over all this, and get additional pleasure from the process!
As for the sound component, the music here is not as aggressively wonderful as in The End is Nigh, you will not play in Celeste just because of the soundtrack. But at the same time, the audio is very, very high quality and organic. Unobtrusive, but lyrical and atmospheric music here is inextricably linked with the whistling of the wind, the singing of birds and even the rumble of water in the ears on the underwater sections of the levels.
On Switch, where, due to the portability of the platform, many unpretentious, rare-arcade games are played without sound at all, you want to play Celeste only with headphones. Celeste's music, by the way, is quite self-sufficient, so you should listen to it without playing at all - you can do it on the Bandcamp of composer Lena Rain .
Like Thornson's previous work, Celeste is a veritable collection of quotes from other games. In addition to the original content, there are direct quotes from Braid, the first Prince of Persia and all kinds of metroidvania (there are no less labyrinths inside the mountain than jumping over rocky ledges outside).
All of them are organically integrated into the overall concept: gameplay elements familiar from other games do not distract from the main mechanics, but rather evoke warm feelings, like meeting old friends. But the main source of inspiration here is Super Mario Bros. 2, the most original and underrated part of the hit series, is a unique vertical platformer with a whole host of groundbreaking mechanics that didn't seem to have bothered to pay attention to before Thornson in video games.
To give just one example: remember what happened in Super Mario Bros. 2, when did you lift the key and try to carry it to the door? In Celeste, you will be relentlessly pursued by both ghosts and very creepy Lovecraft monsters, and you will have to carry much more unusual objects than giant keys.
For all the impeccability of the design, the brightness of the level design and the democratic complexity, Celeste has one very serious flaw, which does not allow us to call Thornson's new work a masterpiece of all time and even makes us doubt whether the game will live up to our lists of the best for 2018.
In Celeste, the only element that failed and could not be in TowerFall: the plot. The whole story about the mountain the heroine climbs turned out to be very awkward, naive, amateur, with thick metaphors like mirrors, from which the girl's dark alter ego jumps out, and completely graphomaniac dialogues, which describe her experiences and contacts with strange people living on the mountain personalities.
I doubt that before Celeste, Thornson (who appears to be the scriptwriter) tried to write even a short story. It's not even about the general obviousness of situations and the poor quality of the text, but about the fact that the main character is a classic "Mary Sue", to whom everyone who meets her is imbued with sympathy and completely inexplicable trust, although she does not demonstrate anything that could cause such an attitude. Madeline is a young, beautiful girl, and, according to the author, this is enough for us to worry about her (either because of her visual appeal, or for reasons of feminism).
I would suggest that Thornson replay Night in the Woods from ex-partner Alec Holovka, a game whose writers have managed to make a beautiful, endearing character out of a dumb, selfish hipster with undiagnosed bipolar disorder and clinical depression. To do this, they had to do a great job - to scratch out sympathy for their heroine through humor, carefully selected situations that reveal the unobvious positive qualities of May and the gradual transformation of her relationship with others.
When Thornson's heroine suffers a panic attack from scratch, this causes not sympathy and understanding, but a desire to get rid of Madeline's personal problems as quickly as possible in order to calmly jump over the rocks.
But dialogue is a huge part of Celeste, there are very long episodes of campfire conversations and even an expanded parody of Stephen King's The Shining with an old hotel and conversations with his manager. This is the weakest level of the game - precisely because it is all built on awkward, amateurish quotes and metaphors of psychological problems - which coexists with the amazing Golden Ridge and even blurts the impression of the start of this magnificent level a little. The mediocrity of the screenwriter here does not even compensate for the amazingly emotional art of the "selfie" with close-ups of the heroine. From other games, Matt Thornson knows how to draw remarkably and naturally, but he does not succeed with borrowing from books, films and real life.
Nowadays, the plot is usually either the strongest or one of the strongest parts of any popular indie game, from Night in the Woods or Oxenfree to Golf Story. And against this background, Celeste, with all its design and gameplay features, looks very amateurish. You can try to consider this as another reference to Super Mario Bros. 2, featuring the most idiotic plot (and the stupidest ending) in the entire series. But I still hope that in the next game Thornson will find himself a normal screenwriter or completely abandon dialogue and writing, as in Limbo or Inside. That's when we'll finally see a real single masterpiece from developer TowerFall.