image from celestegame.com
Celeste is a video game about achievement, depression, and intrapersonal conflict. In the game, you – Madeleine – climb Mount Celeste. Over the course of seven chapters, you face the challenges presented by yourself and by the mountain, and finally emerge victorious. It’s a beautiful story, deeply emotional and yet, at its core, perfectly simplistic. What sets this story apart, is the way Celeste tells you this story: you are Madeleine, and Madeleine is you.
I can point to the exact moment I realised I wanted to write about Celeste. There are only really five characters in the entire game: Madeleine; an old woman who lives on the mountain; Mr. Oshiro, the lost spirit of a hotel clerk; Theo, a fellow climber; and a part of Madeleine made physical by Mount Celeste itself (Shadow-Madeleine, if you will). Shadow-Madeleine, the final and perhaps most interesting character, haunts Madeleine. She is, it seems, what Madeleine was running away from when she came to Mount Celeste. When Shadow-Madeleine is first introduced, she chases you across to the end of the level. Indeed, she haunts you in the levels to come. But at the end of the story’s darkest night, that changes – Madeleine decides to stop running away from the negative, goth-girl part of her, and embraces her instead.
This moment happens in cutscene. And from the cutscene alone, the moment is powerful, but it is nowhere near as powerful as what follows. After the cutscene, you – as Madeleine – now have to chase Shadow-Madeleine. As you chase her, she pushes you away and throws projectiles your way. The challenge of the game is inverted: you go from trying to avoid Shadow-Madeleine to chasing her. By inverting the level design like this, the game turns its core mechanic (platforming) into a storytelling tool. You, the player, feel Madeleine’s fear of self while running. Then, later, her desperate scramble to catch and accept that part of her is mirrored in your own struggle. What’s more, when you finally do catch Shadow-Madeleine, uniting the two, you are rewarded with an extra ability – your initial one dash is now two dashes. In the most intuitive way possible, the game makes Madeleine twice as powerful, and as soon as you get this power, you move to challenges that would have been impossible without it.
This is far from the only time the game’s mechanics tell a story. Madeleine’s anxiety, too, is made tactile. When she has a panic attack, Theo tells her to, ‘focus on your breathing’, while you, the player, are given a mini-game in which you breathe. The mini-game gives you no warning and no tutorial, and learning how to play it on the fly is genuinely panic-inducing. When you do master the new mechanic, Madeleine regains her inner calm. The graphics, music, and movement all reflect that.
Throughout, the game goes to extraordinary lengths to place the player in Madeleine’s position, and these lengths pay off. I should mention here that Celeste is an exceptionally difficult game – and it’s intended to be. Climbing a mountain is difficult. The developers developed an assist mode – an important decision that makes the game accessible – but they placed a disclaimer on this mode: the game is designed to challenge. This difficulty is part of the fun of the game, but it is also narratively useful. Reaching the top is only so rewarding because the climb was hard.
