DISCLAIMERS:
- the reviewer has not finished the game with 100% completion
- the game was played on the Xbox One S using the version of the game intended for United States audiences
Matt Makes Games’ Celeste was among the biggest indie hits of 2018. It was also the only indie game of the year to be nominated for game of the year in 2018. In Celeste, players control Madeline as she attempts to climb up Celeste Mountain. This review will judge the game on its own merits.
The gameplay of Celeste is basically Matt Makes Games’ take on Super Meat Boy. Players will take on multiple chapter that are made up of smaller platforming challenges that are connected and eventually lead to an ending of that chapter. Inside of these platforming challenges the player will use Madeline’s various moves to reach the entrance of another platforming challenge, collect something, or change something in the environment. The thing that the player will spend most of their time collecting are the optional strawberries, which are where most of the difficulty comes in, despite the strange choice to allow the player to keep the strawberry despite dying as long as they touched the floor first. The main campaign of Celeste doesn’t provide much of a challenge otherwise, though. As in Super Meat Boy, the player will quickly respawn at the start of the area if they die, essentially resulting in the game having no punishment for failure. This makes it so the player doesn’t have to get more skilled at the actual game, but instead needs to perfect platforming challenges that often give the player little time to react to the situation they are put in. Madeline’s moveset that is made up of jumping, sliding and jumping off of walls, air dashing, and climbing mostly fit with this gameplay style, with the exception of climbing. The climbing mechanic is never used in any interesting ways in the main campaign and seems only to function as a lazy way to make the game easier. This leaves the included PICO-8 console game, which doesn’t let the player climb, feeling like a more tightly designed experience than the actual full game. Another problem with the main campaign is the difficulty curve and introduction of new mechanics. After around the second chapter the game never really gets any harder, with the last few areas being completely trivialized by a new ability that leaves the ending feeling extremely anticlimactic. The game also fails to introduce any truly original or engaging new mechanics throughout the campaign too, with a glaring omission being any real kind of enemy for Madeline to face while platforming. Thankfully the controls are completely fine in this game, with no glaring issues that the reviewer noticed.
Technically, Celeste doesn’t do much to impress the player. The game at least runs essentially perfectly from what the reviewer saw, as it should based on how the game looks. Matt Makes Games’ made some rather questionable artistic choices in this game. There are three different art styles present, with a fully 3D map, very low resolution pixel art for the actual gameplay, and hand drawn images and icons. All of these feel more like choices made based on convenience rather than an artistic vision, with the 3D map with very little detail being looked around with the camera to represent Celeste Mountain and the chapter select screen, rather basic and low resolution tiles being used throughout the actual gameplay, and a few hand drawn elements being overlaid on the gameplay mostly during story moments because the pixel art doesn’t give a very good idea of what is actually happening. The lack of a cohesive art style during the gameplay especially makes the game look rather unpolished, with some hand drawn elements, such as arrows pointing to things on the screen for the player to look at, being hand drawn for no obvious reason other than lack of effort. At least nothing about the presentation hurts the actual gameplay experience of the game.
Celeste doesn’t exactly impress with its music either. It certainly isn’t bad, and the reviewer didn’t find it annoying during their play-through, but the reviewer has no desire to listen to the rather generic music outside of the game. Matt Makes Games’ also attempts to emulate Banjo-Kazooie‘s “voice acting” but does it nowhere near as well, with most of the characters in Celeste sounding like the strangest noises a text to speech program can make and none of the sounds matching what the characters are saying or doing particularly well.
Celeste doesn’t provide much in the way of plot either. The story basically involves Madeline fighting her mental illness as she climbs up Celeste Mountain to prove to herself that she can achieve things. The story is told rather quickly with little and rather uninteresting writing that fails to give a powerful message (to the reviewer, at least). Thankfully, the plot is essentially completely skippable.
What Celeste does do well is provide value. For the heavily discounted price Celeste goes for compared to full priced games, it gives a surprisingly large amount of platforming challenges for the player to take on. Matt Makes Games’ also promises to provide even more challenges in the form of free DLC that has not released at the time of the writing of this review. Overall the game is absolutely worth it, as long as the buyer enjoys the gameplay style and doesn’t expect a high budget or extremely polished product.
Overall the reviewer would give the game a 7 out of 10.
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