Time Extend
How facing inner turmoil helped us climb a mountain
Celeste presented us with a mountain to climb – but the real one was inside us all along
You may well wonder why Madeline wants to climb Celeste Mountain. It’s clear from the moment we meet her that she is no mountaineer; she’s hardly even the outdoorsy type. She arrives at the base of Celeste because she feels conflicted, without quite knowing why or what about. Madeline is snappy and irritable, suffers from panic attacks, and needs to get out of her own head. Her chosen task feels almost masochistic, more like self-punishment for her sense of inadequacy than a healthy challenge. Which raises another question: if Madeline seeks out Celeste because she feels conflicted, what does that say about why we seek out Celeste?
Celeste is a game about coping with anxiety and depression, but also speaks to a deeper sense that we’re never quite aligned with ourselves. There’s always an itch we can never quite reach. It’s an idea that runs to the heart of psychoanalysis, back to Freud himself, and the discontent of repressing our drives for the sake of civilisation. So it’s no surprise if we invent challenges to escape, or in vague hope of finding our complete selves on the way. Celeste provides both. It can be an engrossing distraction, certainly, but its arduous ascent can lead to a kind of self-acceptance – if only we can recognise that our notions of achievement and wholeness may be the obstacles standing in the way.
On one level, Celeste feels a little like a self-help guide, gamifying Madeline’s stress to help us overcome self-doubt and recognise our inner powers. Its familiar 2D spaces, arranged with fixed and hanging platforms, ask us to use simple tools – jump, wall grab, air dash – to cross from one side of a screen to the other. Each traversal digs in the comforting foothold of a new checkpoint. Each checkpoint signifies a step of progress, counted out by height markers painted on the walls. 100m. 200m. You’re getting there. Just stay in the moment, and focus on the array of crumbling floors, spikes, springboards and elevators in front of you. Breathe.
We’re certainly not the first to note that Celeste translates its character’s emotional struggles into game design – but it cuts both ways. For the player, reaching the summit is a matter of dexterity and ingenuity, yes, but also of confronting our own hang-ups head on. Celeste is a platformer of rare quality, as assured and ingenious in its design as any since Super Mario World. But with its world of precise, flat rules, this is a game you need to talk yourself through, one whose core gameplay loop is self-doubt, frustration, resolve, belief.
Every layout, the position of every block, in Celeste seems planned to prick your anxiety. Screens are visually imposing – jagged walls surrounding slivers of safe ground, suspended over chasms – and each chapter takes a unique twist on the mechanics then ratchets up its complexity to harrowing heights. Take the hotel chapter, with its deadly spongy mould that first lines surfaces, then grows underfoot, then shuttles back and forth at speed in spidery balls. Now, how about adding moving trampoline platforms to make it harder to avoid? And for your final trick, can you do it all while being chased by the ghostly hotel manager?
Every new screen evokes a sinking feeling. Surely this one is asking too much. But a dozen speedy deaths later, Madeline evaporating and instantly reforming at the starting line, you begin to figure out the first few jumps and dashes, the timing, the momentum. (Celeste is a demon with the nuances of trajectory and inertia in its moving platforms.) Having eventually conquered that first plateau, you’ll probably find yourself struggling to find purchase on the final stretch. But you did the prior one, so why not this one? It’s just a little more intricate. You make a slight adjustment to your approach and it changes the flow of the whole thing. Now it’s doable. Now you’ve done it. See? You had it in you all along. Wait, what the hell is this next screen?
It’s not only about you, though. The real elegance of Celeste is how it plucks your feelings in tune with Madeline’s state of mind. Her angst and social clumsiness are revealed through conversations with characters she meets on the way, such as laid-back drifter Theo and the mocking Granny who lives at the base of the slope. But most of all, through her dark alter
ego, ‘Badeline’, conjured up from her mirror image by the mystical power of the mountain. Badeline wants Madeline to give up and go home. She’s your fear. The nagging doubt. The frequent reminder that you’re battling yourself, not the game.
In early encounters, Badeline hounds you through sequences of screens, inducing stress and panic. You escape, but she’ll be back – she’s part of you – and each time the anxiety increases. In the penultimate chapter, Madeline feels she’s able to discard Badeline for good, which only makes things worse; the doppelgänger’s wrath throws both of them back down the mountain. Having made so much progress, Madeline literally hits rock bottom (mountains make for flexible metaphors). It’s hugely demoralising, and hard not to dwell in a funk as you tackle the subsequent level, an aptly stodgy affair of awkward transitions atop muttering grump-faced blocks.
The only hope is to embrace your inner Badeline and somehow use your fear, not repress it. After a dramatic face-off, Madeline accepts Badeline as part of herself, and finds a new energy. They fly up the mountain together, to attack the final ascent. Now you can execute a double air dash – the game’s only real ‘upgrade’ – and Badeline can catch and throw you to otherwise unreachable heights. In an exhilarating spin on the old final-level boss rush, the climax recalls the themes of all previous chapters, not as a gruelling test but as a measure of how far you’ve come. Zipping to the summit with your boosted agility is empowering. Gamified coping strategies have long faded against the fruits of self-confrontation, your innate reserves of possibility. Never has the last stage of a game been so joyous in its labours.
And yet, Celeste makes clear, the struggle with ourselves is never over. It stands ready to puncture and reinflate our confidence almost endlessly, with trickier remixes of its already devious designs. Finishing the chapters is one thing, but what about collecting all the strawberries, or completing tougher B-side versions? And a hidden final chapter. And C-sides. And the ultra-hard DLC. Most of us will have a breaking point, but we’ll probably hit it much later than we initially expected, as it coaxes us to grapple with the messy nature of progress and our own mental blocks.
Unless, that is, you’d simply rather not bother. You can always activate Celeste’s Assist Mode, opting for infinite dashes, slow motion and invincibility. It seems blasphemous for a game so enamoured with challenge to allow this, but why not? Why must we adhere obediently to arbitrary game rules? Aren’t some challenges overwhelming not because we’re inadequate, but because they’re unreasonable? Why can’t we simply ask for help?
Madeline finally realises that selfreconciliation doesn’t come through
MOST OF US WILL HAVE A BREAKING POINT, BUT WE’LL PROBABLY HIT IT MUCH LATER THAN WE INITIALLY EXPECTED
Grabbing a feather in some later stages triggers a short burst of flight, usually through mazes of spikes reaching distant goals. If anything, it’s the other way around. Reconciliation helps her to climb the mountain, along with the ‘assistance’ of Theo and Granny, once she opens up to them and heeds their advice. Similarly, even if we never call on Assist Mode, the knowledge that the game designers were willing to offer a helping hand gives a feeling of being supported. Not to mention that its presence asks an important question: is the real challenge admitting that you need assistance? It points to a toxic underside to selfcompetition, which causes us to pressure ourselves into excess toil for the smallest potential gain. It prompts us to stop and think about who we are and what we want, instead of what we’re supposed to do.
Such notions have been crystallised by Celeste’s creator Maddy Thorson, whose work on the game wraps into these themes of challenge and self-reconciliation. Since the release of its Farewell DLC chapter, Thorson has written how Celeste was unconsciously a way to come to terms with their then-unidentified non-binary gender identity. In retrospect, Madeline is a trans woman and her story is a trans story, a struggle to understand who she is. For Thorson, Celeste was in part a way to work through the feelings and frustrations that Madeline embodies, and a crucial factor they cite in meeting the project’s challenges was the help of friends.
Thorson also explains that the selfunderstanding they reached doesn’t mean their gender identity is neatly settled now, just as Madeline can’t discard Badeline, and just as no one is fully at one with themselves. In that sense, Celeste is a trans story that should inspire a sense of solidarity in players. Even if you related to Madeline on another level, Thorson says, “you could take this as evidence that trans and cis feelings aren’t so different”, and that “most of the ways that trans existence is alien to you are the result of unjust social othering and oppression.” Indeed, we can’t forget that the cause of our internal conflict is in some way social too – a response to demands instructing us how to feel complete, alienating those who don’t fit prescribed norms. So Celeste is about helping one other to accept ourselves, but also working to make those external demands less oppressive. Now there’s a mountain worth climbing.