Celeste | Togetherness Reviewed
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This is it, Madeline. Just breathe. Why are you so nervous?”
Celeste is a platformer about climbing a mountain which takes inspiration from a real mountain in British Columbia. You play as Madeline, a short, young Canadian woman with a single curl in her red hair. The bulk of her opposition towards completing her journey comes from within herself. Her demons are personified in her alter ego and deuteragonist, Badeline, referred to in the game as “Part of You.”
As soon as she is introduced, Madeline’s doppelganger knows exactly how to provoke her angers and her anxieties, and it becomes clear that Celeste is about far more than climbing a mountain. Celeste’s controls are snappy and fluid, but Madeline’s movement is probably the only thing you really have control over. As soon as the game starts, Madeline is thrust into dangerous and tricky screens, but unlike most platformers, each screen is quick and snappy. As soon as you die, the game transports you to the beginning of the screen, and not all the way back at the beginning of the level. There are no timers, there are no life counts, there are no goals other than what the player chooses to impose on themselves. You’re not punished for dying or taking risks — you are only rewarded for what you learn and accomplish. It gives the game plenty of replay value and makes it popular within the speedrunning community. More importantly, it also gives you everything you need to succeed in the upcoming levels that progressively get more challenging.
As Celeste evolves, we learn more about Madeline. We learn she isn’t a mountain climber, but that she isn’t trying to be. She climbs Mount Celeste for herself, to overcome a Part of Herself that she isn’t proud of. Madeline experiences panic attacks, which manifest themselves in the mountain in ways that she didn’t expect. That theme of Celeste is one of the most effective demonstrations of mental illness that I have ever seen.
The lessons Celeste teaches you are rarely tangible. Rather, the game teaches the player to test themself — and that they are more than they perceive themselves to be. The game allows the player to try things they thought they couldn’t, just like Madeline had doubts she could climb the mountain. Like mental illness, success in Celeste is incremental and defined by the individual.
The only reason this works, however, is because of how well the game connects the player to Madeline. Madeline’s successes become the player’s successes. The lingering feeling of the game’s perceived impossibility disappears the further you progress, and I found myself feeling less despair and more motivation the longer I continued playing. Just like Madeline, the player slowly learns to not overcome their feelings, but embrace them, and it is then the player can achieve success.
Writing about Celeste would be incomplete without talking about its music. It not only follows the trend of brilliant original soundtracks for games, it brilliantly accomplishes the game’s depiction of anxiety by playing into the anxieties of the player as the game progresses. It can play into the positive stress — eustress — of finishing a hard level, but it also knows when to have the opposite effect. It uses the distress of a hard boss fight, longer than usual screen, or a cutscene to make the player feel the anxiety Madeline does. It treads the fine line of being stressful enough to cause the player to want to improve, but not stressful enough to be overwhelming, except in the right circumstances.
There are so many things Lena did with Celeste’s OST that I can’t bear to pick just one to talk about, but I think I have to. Spoilers ahead:
It starts with a simple piano melody. You’ve completed the chapter, everything feels fine. You’re making small talk with Theo. Everything’s fine. You’re riding a gondola. Everything’s fine. Until something feels off. The piano no longer seems calming. You’re high above the ground in an old rickety machine. A nervous jolt crawls up your back. Seconds pass. The nerves only build.
And then the gondola stalls. The piano melody is overwhelmed by a jarring, harsh synth. The earth seems to stop spinning. You think you’re falling but in reality you’re standing still. The air, already thin, seems even thinner. Everything is pulsating, fading in and out, the corner of your mind insists that you are DEAD. Everything is cool, but you’re not cool. You’re going to die. But then you remember the feather. Slowly you get a grip. Your body cooperates with your mind, and you remember you’re not in danger.
The awful fire in your spinal column goes out. the gondola starts up again, the brain-stabbing synths become a fleeting memory. the piano continues its refrain. it doesn’t sound so off-putting anymore. Everything’s fine.
The game’s music helped give me something I didn’t have before — hope. Confidence. A reason to keep going. It helped me feel more connected to my emotions, and put a name to them. It helped me understand my emotions, and know that sometimes it’s okay to let them out. When the composer puts so much of her own struggle with anxiety into the game in order to tell Celeste’s story through its music, you can’t help but feel connected to it.
I think this incremental approach to becoming more in touch with yourself is in part why this game is so popular with the LGBTQ community. Madeline is confirmed to be transgender by her creator, Maddy Thorson, who is nonbinary themself and used the process of creating the game to help understand their own gender identity. I think the reason I was able to connect to Celeste so well was because I found solace in Madeline. She is a character that members of the transgender community, such as myself, can relate to with a fond spirit. Being transgender is full of anxieties and doubts, and much of this comes not just from the world but from the self too. Madeline taught me how to embrace a part of myself that is different and challenging.
Rejecting our emotions never works. As I was coming to terms with my queer identity, I wanted nothing more than to shed it from me. I played the game of “I wish” — I wish I had never met my best friend, I wish I had never tried on new clothes or new names, and I wish I didn’t like them. While this provided catharsis at first, overall it only intensified my feelings, and it made me forget why I decided to take this climb in the first place. Throughout this exploration of myself, I became a much stronger, more sensitive person — and those are lessons I will take away no matter whether I “reach the summit”. As Madeline learns, trying to reject a part of yourself is impossible, because it wasn’t brought out of her for nothing. It existed well before she took the trip up the mountain, well before it personified by breaking out of a mirror and obstructing her way. By learning to embrace and even work with this reality, Madeline became the best version of herself, and this is a lesson I will keep with me for the rest of my life.
Celeste is not a story about climbing a mountain, but that doesn’t make the climb’s completion any less satisfying. Reaching the summit of Celeste was the first time I had ever completed a video game. There were many in which I had come close — dabbled in a bit, maybe made some progress, but ultimately gave up when success felt out of reach. The final screens of Celeste required every last bit of skill that I had learned, right up until the end, when the soundtrack calmed, the ascent became easier, and Madeline approached a big red flag and a beautiful view. There was no fanfare, no crowd to admire your success, no trophy or medal. Just you. Climbing Mt. Celeste is your success, and the game lets the celebration be yours.
It is anticlimactic, but beautiful, and it is a perfect reminder of how we progress as humans. Some players might be happy completing just the first stage, others might push further to complete the B and C sides or the downloadable content level titled Farewell with a supplementary plot that I am told is just as beautiful. But I set my sights on the mountain, and I did it. It’s not much, but I am proud anyways.
My mental health journey is a lot like that too. When each day is a struggle, nothing feels more necessary than a climb up a strange mountain. There are setbacks, there are pitfalls. There are always temptations to give up and go home. Sometimes even basic steps seem hard, but I’ve had to learn not to beat myself up for defining success in such small terms. Like in Celeste, you are not judged by what you fail to accomplish — the game encourages you to be proud of your death counts, and each death teaches you something and gives you further motivation and purpose — rather, you are judged by what you do accomplish, what you learn, and how you do it. My struggles, in the game and out of it, are a badge of honor, and it is in this way that Celeste truly is more magical than the climb. Some games try to replace the feeling of a fun game with a complex behemoth offering as many things as possible. Whether that’s unnecessary mechanics, features that aren’t quite fleshed out, or focusing too much on the graphics, these games often feel like the jack of all trades, but master of none. Not Celeste. No game will ever be able to replace the simplicity of its incremental journey through yourself and towards a mountaintop view unlike any other.
I give Celeste five stars.
- Grey Alexander Crawford
This essay was created as part of the project Togetherness Reviewed, a podcast based on the format of The Anthropocene Reviewed which reviews facets of the human centered planet on a five-star scale. You can learn more about this project on Twitter or by joining the project’s Discord server.
