Celeste the spiritual successor to Super Meat Boy
TWO games about climbing mountains have found themselves amidst the buzz of online chatter in recent times.
One of these games is a terrible chore made even more terrible through the delivery of meaningless platitudes by a smug narrator, while the other is an incredible experience made even more incredible by a surprisingly earnest story woven deftly into a 2D platformer. Celeste is the latter of these two games and the focus of this review.
Looks can be deceiving and Celeste epitomises this sentiment. On the surface, the game appears to be yet another retro pixel-art 2D platformer but any cursory inspection below surface level reveals Celeste to be surprisingly deep in both content and gameplay.
Althought the protagonist Madeline is rendered as pixels, the unfolding plot paints a more complete picture of her in the mind’s eye.
The familiarity of Madeline’s troubles will probably be borderline uncomfortable for some players and this fact alone is testament to the developer’s ability to forge a meaningful story in the most unlikely of formats.
Story aside (you have the choice to pretty much skip the entirety of the story, should you desire), the gameplay is nothing short of spectacular.
Although players are only furnished with two distinct abilities - Madeline can dash quickly and climb walls for a limited amount of time - the amount of variation the developer has managed to eke out of these two moves is absolutely astounding.
Between carefully positioned floating crystals that can refresh your dash ability, some subtle manipulation of the core mechanics and ridiculously clever platforming, you will find yourself whizzing about with a breathless confidence in short order.
Celeste features unlimited restarts and is quite generous with autosaving, which is good because you will die a great many times as the game is rather unforgiving in just about every other department.
Celeste seems like the spiritual successor to Super Meat Boy. Where many other games have struggled to take the coveted platforming/climbing crown, Celeste takes it with ease.