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I’ve spent a lot of this year getting around to games from the past number of years that passed me by when they originally came out and although I played it for a bit when it first released, it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I properly sunk my teeth into Celeste. What I discovered was a masterclass in level design and movement mechanics in games, the likes of which I haven’t seen on this quality since N++.
So, I thought what better way to celebrate everything that’s great about Celeste than ranking each chapter and analysing what makes each one tick. This does mean that one chapter is going to have to be last, but I want to make it clear that I think every chapter is masterfully designed, it’s just some rely on gimmicks and features that don’t enthuse me as much as others. Also, I’ll only be taking into account the A and B sides of each level, because I’m not nearly good enough to tackle the C sides yet and also Chapter 9 isn’t being included because I can’t even put a dent in that thing.
And with that, let’s start.
8 – Chapter 3: Celestial Resort
Cycles, cycles, so many cycles.
What puts this level firmly in last is the gimmick because I really find the nature of the Dust Bunnies to be incredibly frustrating. The overall visual design of the level is great and I feel a heavy atmosphere when playing through this level more so than most other levels in the game, but the platforming challenges relied so heavily on setting off at the right time so your jumps and dashes meet up with the cycles that it often became frustrating to find the right time to begin.
That said, it does work from time to time and I think the gimmick as a whole works a lot better in the B-side, where the whole point is that it’s impenetrably difficult when you first encounter it. When the level gives up on the idea that it’s supposed to be a fair challenge and just throws everything it has it ends up working a hell of a lot better, perhaps because I went into the B-side with a very different mindset compared to that of the A-side.
As I said in the intro, this is by no means a bad level but it’s certainly the one that gives me the most negative emotions whenever I revisit it.
7 – Chapter 1: Forsaken City
This almost feels a little unfair, because, for the first proper level in the game, this is the perfect design. The reason I’m dropping it so low is simply that once you’ve got good enough to complete the later levels, this becomes way too easy and pretty boring to replay.
All the other levels have some degree of replayability, even once you’ve completed the game and have far superior skill to what you did when you first started the game, but this is the one level that doesn’t feel fun to replay at all. It’s absolutely necessary though, since if the game threw some of the seemingly impossible scenarios at you straight away most players wouldn’t push forward with the game at all, but it’s at the cost of replayability. Even the B-side, although much more difficult, is still fairly easy when compared to all the other B-side levels in the game.
What I love about Forsaken City though, is the aesthetic of the place. The visuals of this city that are only half-finished and has been left to be reclaimed by nature has an eerie beauty and when paired with the simple music & ambient sound effects, it creates a level that can be quite threatening in its beauty, which is much what I imagine a half-built & abandoned city would feel like in real life.
6 – Chapter 4: Goldern Ridge
FUCKING WIND!
So this is another level where the gimmick is something I’m not particularly a fan of, the difference here though is that the gimmick doesn’t run through the whole level, only the latter half of it. Not to mention as much as I have my annoyances with the wind it’s actually a very clever idea in terms of making a challenging puzzle platformer; at least with the way it’s implemented here.
The reason I’m not particularly fond of it is mostly down to personal taste because of some reason I find this to be one of the most frustrating mechanics in the game. I think the reason for that is because over the course of the game up until this point I’d built up an understand and feel for how Madaline moved, the run speed, jump height and such like so for simple jumps I could rely on instinct to know when was the right moment to jump, dash etc, but the wind changes that.
When there are winds blowing against Madaline her movements no longer correspond with what I’ve got in my head, meaning I have to re-learn everything again to be able to platform accurately. Like I said, it’s a very clever way to implement a challenge into the game, but I struggled for quite a while to go against these instincts that I’d built up and it made for a rather frustrating time while playing through the latter half of this chapter.
5 – Chapter 8: Core
Chapter 8 is extremely different from any other chapter in the game, which is in some ways to its benefit and its other ways not so much.
First, the things I liked. Changing the rules on when Madaline’s boost could recharge for this chapter added a brilliant new layer to everything and allowed the level designers to have much greater control over where you would be able to have your boosts, putting a lot more importance on where they should be used. I also thought the switching between hot and cold was a great gimmick for the level, that allowed for two very different styles of platforming in the same level, sometimes even in the same room and the micing of those two styles is where a large portion of the challenge for the level comes in.
When it comes to the difficulty of this level, I’m of two minds because Chapter 8 is a significant leap in difficulty from Chapter 7. On the one hand, I wasn’t a fan of going from the slight steps up in challenge that the game had presented me with until now to this massive leap I experience and it felt a little unfair. However, given that you need at least 4 crystal hearts to get into this level at all (which involves either solving vague puzzles or completing the B-sides) it means that you’ve got to have a decent level of skill by this point anyway, so if it is an issue, it’s not a very big one.
What I don’t like about Core mostly comes down to the details of the rooms themselves. While the extra limits on boosts create a good challenge, it did get incredibly frustrating at times and there were a couple of rooms that I found I mostly lucked my way through, especially the one room that’s full of the bumpers, which seems like complete random chance if you survive or not. Of course, you could easily chalk down those complaints to me being crap at the game, which isn’t entirely untrue, but these aren’t problems I’d had with any other chapter before this one.
4 – Chapter 2: Old Site
This suffers from several of the same problems as Chapter 1 did, but what makes me like this one so much more is how much fun this level’s gimmick is to mess around with.
There’s something about the way the dream blocks work that makes them so much fun to continuously boost through and the puzzles involving them are easily the most enjoyable to platform through. Here, the relative ease of the chapter seems more to it benefits than its detriment because of how satisfying and fun it can be to platform through, not to mention the B-side for this level is definitely my favourite in the game…apart from the last screen which is the worst.
On top of that, you’ve got the chase section with Badaline and I always love it when platformers put the pressure on you to pull off tricky platforming very quickly, it’s why that bit in Mirror’s Edge with the people chasing you through a wide-open space is the best part of the game. That section, in particular, gives you so much to think about as you’re dashing through the dream blocks trying to get away because while going quick you also have to account for timing of where Badaline’s going to be, not to mention having to work out how to get through the room at all very quickly.
I can’t rank this too highly because of the lower difficulty level, but it has a lot going for it so that I still enjoy going back and giving it a replay.
3 – Chapter 5: Mirror Temple
This chapter is quite unique when it comes to its design. All the other levels are fairly linear, with one room going right into the next, with hidden rooms and secret paths only leading to collectables, however, chapter 5 takes a slightly different approach.
Instead, the main portion of the level is quite sprawling, with several large rooms featuring as the centrepiece to a level full of side rooms each providing their own challenges to get both collectables and keys necessary to progress. This often gave a little breathing room between each of the challenges and overall made for a level that I had a lot more fun exploring because it wasn’t difficult challenge after difficult challenge; not to say that style of level isn’t great of course, but the differences in this level make it a breath of fresh air.
Following that segment, there are the segments where you have to outmanoeuvre the Seekers in what are some pretty fun challenges and very satisfying when you time your jumps correctly to send you flying to your goal. This is of course followed by carrying Theo through the exit to the temple which is once again, a challenge that no other level has anything similar to and it results in quite a challenging segment when it starts to throw everything at you at once.
This level hits on a lot of unique ideas that no other level has to the point where it feels fundamentally different to everything else in the game. It makes for a bit of an oddity of a level, but one that I have quite a fondness for whenever I go back and play it.
2 – Chapter 6: Reflection
The story of Celeste is something I haven’t really touched on up until this point because for the most part, it’s a very small part of the game, however, this chapter is where all of the conflict comes to a head and it makes for a fantastic level to play.
Right at the start, there’s the absolute gut-punch of being shot right back down to the bottom of the mountain, after spending 5 chapters clawing your way up to that point and you have to deal with that annoyance as you claw yourself out of that pit for the first section of the level. The mechanics in this part of the level are fairly minimal and not all that difficult which is fine because it’s not what the main focus of the level, although I do like the feathers, which add a lot to other levels after being introduced here.
The focus of this level, however – and the reason I’ve placed it this high – is the “fight” with Badaline. Mechanically it’s a masterwork, the layout of the rooms give you so many opportunities and chances to make ground and Badline’s attacks are balanced in the perfect way to make it just the right level of challenge, I always have so much fun when I’m playing through it. Outside of the mechanics of the game, however, there’s so much emotional significance to it. If you weren’t aware, Celeste’s story is about living with mental health problems, specifically anxiety and depression, and that side of Madaline’s personality that she’s been trying to bury for so long is exactly what Badaline represents.
This chapter is when Madaline tries to get rid of her for good, thinking she’s doing the right thing and helping them both out, only for Badaline to completely freak. It forces Madaline to understand that fear Badaline feels after Madaline has spent her entire life ignoring her or trying to get rid of her and she’s so hurt that she refuses to listen when Madaline realises she was wrong. The “boss fight” isn’t much of a right, in reality, it’s simply you quite literally trying to reach Badaline as she tries to stop you getting close and that’s just a brilliant metaphor for how coming to grips with your own mental health problems can feel.
The whole concept of it was an absolute genius stroke of game design and it’s still just as fun and challenging as every other stage in the game to boot.
1 – Chapter 7: The Summit
I dunno what it is, but something about the opening card to that level alongside the music fills me with more determination than I’ve ever felt in my life.
This chapter is the culmination of all the trials and tribulations you’ve been through in your journey to climb the mountain, the highs and lows, all of them pay off in this level as you start from the very bottom and go all the way to the top to complete your quest. Going into this level I was so pumped to finally finish it and the way the music started me off it honestly made me feel like nothing could stop me and I had so much fun on this final ascent.
We caught a glimpse of it at the end of chapter 6, but here we see the two boosts used to their full potential as the genius level design pours into every room of the level, creating some incredibly challenging, but very rewarding puzzles. By this point in the game, you will have developed quite a large array of skills and this level makes sure to put it all to the test.
This chapter quite literally takes through all of the previous stages with brand new rooms containing each of the level’s gimmicks and it’s such a joy to return to each level, only now with the difficulty cranked up a notch. This feels like a true final exam for the game because you have to actually recall every skill you’ve used throughout the game in order to get through each of the previous stages, only for it to throw a whole bunch of new stuff at you.
The final segment where you climb the very peak of the mountain is easily what secured this level as first place in my mind. First off there are the flags, as I mentioned before I already felt determined coming into this level, but having the numbered flags as you reach the top was a stroke of genius to push those feelings into overdrive. I’d completed the exact same mental transformation that Madaline went through in the story, my attitude was no longer “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do this” it was now, “I can do this and I WILL do this” and I didn’t even notice that until after the fact, but it was such a beautiful moment.
On top off that there’s the fact that the platforming challenges in that final segment are easily the best in the game, I ran through some of them first try on luck and instinct alone, while others had me ramming my head into them over and over again (flag 9 to 8, you know what you did). When I finished most other chapters in the games I felt a sense of relief, but when I finished summit I stood triumphant, I had fought this mountain head-on and I came out the victor, it felt like a true achievement…then I played the B-sides…and then the C-sides…and then Chapter 9…I can never win.
And that’s my list! Thank you very much for reading this, please let me know what your favourite chapters of Celeste were either in the comments below or on Twitter @10ryawoo! Finally, make sure to come back the same time next week where I will be ranking every championship currently in WWE!
The Strong Style Smark 