Celeste

really made me feel like a teenage girl with mental health issues

📖 "Climbing Mountains, Inside and Out"

Celeste scaled onto digital platforms on January 25, 2018, while the #MeToo movement was gaining momentum and cryptocurrencies were experiencing their first major boom-and-bust cycle. As conversations about mental health were becoming increasingly destigmatized in mainstream culture, the tiny independent team at Matt Makes Games (later reformed as Extremely OK Games) delivered this pixelated platformer with surprising emotional depth. The core team of Matt Thorson, Noel Berry, Amora Bettany, Pedro Medeiros, Lena Raine, and Kevin Regamey crafted this challenging masterpiece during a time of personal transitions, channeling their own struggles with anxiety and self-doubt into a game about a young woman facing her inner demons.

Looking back, Celeste's metaphor of climbing a mountain as a parallel to overcoming personal challenges feels even more resonant now. I remember dying hundreds of times on those precise platforming sequences, each death not a punishment but a gentle encouragement to try again—a revolutionary approach to difficulty that mirrored changing attitudes about resilience and mental health. The game's stunning pixel art and Lena Raine's haunting soundtrack created an atmosphere that elevated what could have been a simple platformer into something profoundly moving. Those strawberry collectibles and B-side challenges kept me coming back long after completing the main story, each successful screen traversal feeling like a personal victory against impossibility. In a genre often defined by nostalgia, Celeste managed to feel both timeless and perfectly of its moment—a pixel-perfect reflection of our collective journey toward self-acceptance.

Celeste might be the Cutest but also the Hardest game ever made.
It's harder than Dark souls,harder than metroidvanias,harder than any other Platformer.
What makes it so hard is the precision platforming,it's like implementing Geometry algorithm into a videogame.
Each Angle,each movement should be precise and perfected like calculating a math problem which I suck the most.
Its the most frustrated game I have ever played but also the most amount of time I ever spend and I wonder why.
Never have I ever been fascinated with the story in a Platformer.
Sonic,Mario,Donkey,Rayman they are all there but that's about it when it comes to story telling.
Maddy is however Special,she has alter ego.It's like depicting real life character,where you have to go through mental state and overcome yourself.
If the Story is about Climbing the Summit,it's a message for hope in yourself that you can do it even if you try and fail so many times.

I Gave up,fuck this game.
Its just constant agression with no rewarding but also very much time consuming.
I spend 20 hrs,playing for a year and I m still at chapter 4 :/

I like bananas,not strawberries.
Yes Donkey Kong,I love you too.

There is no joke here. This game is beautiful

A super fun yet super difficult but fair platformer. The respawn time is practically non-existant which made deaths bearable. One of the best rogulike games out there.

The best game, ever.