Celeste — The Precision Platformer Where Every Death Is Your Own Fault (and That's the Point)

Celeste got a 10/10 from IGN, a 9/10 from GameSpot, and a "Recommended" from Eurogamer on day one of release. It cost a two-person team about two and a half years to build. The entire moveset fits on one controller face: run, jump, wall-climb, wall-jump, one air dash. That's it.

What Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry figured out is that a very small set of actions — when each one feels exactly right — is more satisfying than a large one where half of them feel mushy. Every death in Celeste is a teaching moment the game sets up deliberately, not a random spike of unfairness. If you cleared the gap, you'll feel it in your hands. If you didn't, you already know what you did wrong before the respawn animation finishes.

The game sold over 500,000 copies in 2018 alone and crossed 1.7 million by January 2025. It has an active speedrunning community, a massive mod ecosystem, and a free expansion (Farewell, released September 2019) that added a ninth chapter to the base eight. 1

Madeline can run left or right, jump, cling to any wall until her stamina runs out, wall-jump off a surface, and dash mid-air in any of eight directions. The dash refreshes when you land on the ground or touch a green crystal. That's the complete set of inputs. 2

The game is divided into chapters, and each chapter is a series of single-screen puzzles. You enter a screen, figure out which combination of moves gets you to the exit, die a few dozen times, and move on. The death count at the end of each chapter is usually in the hundreds — not because the game is punishing, but because each screen genuinely has something new to teach you before you can pass it. Dream blocks transport you through walls when you dash into them. Moving platforms pass momentum to Madeline when she jumps off them. Bubbles carry her in a fixed arc. Bounce pads change direction mid-air. Every mechanic appears, gets embedded in your muscle memory across three or four screens, and then the game starts combining them.

There are also strawberries — optional collectibles scattered throughout each level that don't unlock anything. You collect them to prove you can. Completionists can go further with hidden cassette tapes that unlock B-side versions of each chapter: same chapter layout, same mechanics, substantially harder. And after all eight B-sides, C-side levels open up — extremely short, no checkpoints, maximum precision required.

The game ships with Assist Mode. You can turn it on from the menu at any time without penalty. Options include: slow down game speed, give Madeline unlimited dashes, enable invincibility. This was the developers' deliberate response to the Cuphead difficulty discourse that started in late 2017 — they wanted players who found the base game too hard to still be able to reach the ending. Rock Paper Shotgun said it solved difficulty "so elegantly that everyone should be paying attention." 3

The controls have several invisible assists built in. "Coyote time" lets you jump for a small window after walking off a ledge. Jump inputs buffer, so if you press jump slightly before touching the ground it still registers. Rounded corners prevent you from catching on wall edges in ways that feel arbitrary. These details are why Polygon described the game's movement as "consistent" and said they felt "in complete control" at all times. 2

The overwhelmingly common opinion: the moment-to-moment controls feel better than almost any 2D platformer. Multiple reviewers at outlets including Ars Technica, IGN, Wired, and VideoGamer.com put Celeste's movement into the same sentence as "best in any game." Game Informer gave it 9/10 and called it "hard to put down." Nintendo Life gave it a perfect 10 and described it as "the absolute peak of personal exploration and discovery on Nintendo Switch." 5 6

The soundtrack is separately acclaimed. Composer Lena Raine built a system where each character has a dedicated instrument: piano for Madeline, synthesizer for Badeline, guitar for Theo. The score adapts dynamically so that chase sequences hear the synthesizer theme "engulf" the piano theme. Several critics named it among the best video game soundtracks they'd heard. IGN said the music added "an amazing amount of life" to each area. 1

The game has real detractors, and their complaints are specific. The analog stick is a legitimate issue — several Metacritic user reviews note that very precise diagonal dashes are harder to execute consistently on a thumbstick than on a D-pad or keyboard, making the Switch version feel slightly less reliable for the hardest sections. A vocal minority finds the aesthetic story messaging heavy-handed; one Metacritic reviewer put it as "millennial writing" that disrupted the flow of gameplay. Some players coming from Hollow Knight or The Messenger found the pixel art less impressive than those games' visuals, and a handful of negative reviews explicitly question whether some of the hardest screens — particularly in later chapters — cross the line from "skill-based" to "luck-dependent," given that hundreds of attempts on a single screen makes it hard to know whether you improved or just got lucky with a pattern. 7 8

The honest difficulty framing: this game will kill you hundreds of times per chapter. The Metacritic user score is 8.7 — very strong — but the 5% of users giving it a 0–4 are a specific group: players who expected something closer to a standard platform game and found the death loop exhausting rather than motivating.

Who is and isn't the target player: If you cleared Hollow Knight without too much frustration and enjoyed the satisfaction of that game's harder bosses, Celeste's core eight chapters will suit you well. If you bounced off Super Meat Boy within two hours, Assist Mode is there and not a stigma. If you have zero interest in precision platformers and specifically dislike dying repeatedly on the same screen, no amount of good writing fixes that mismatch.

Madeline is a young woman who has decided to climb a mountain called Celeste. She doesn't explain why at the start. She just goes. An old woman at the base warns her against it; she ignores the warning.

The mountain itself is strange. Abandoned areas, places that shouldn't exist, things that happen that can't be explained by the physical environment. Early in the climb, Madeline encounters a dark reflection of herself in a mirror — a figure the game eventually names Badeline. This reflection doubts her. It says she's not ready, that she'll fail, that the climb is a bad idea. It tries to stop her.

The game was written by Thorson during a period she described as her own depression and anxiety becoming too severe to ignore. She chose not to consult mental health professionals and wrote instead from personal experience, which is why the portrayal resonates as idiosyncratic rather than clinical. The mountain-climbing premise is a concrete physical challenge that runs alongside a less concrete one: what it takes to push through something when a part of you is convinced you shouldn't. 1 10

The Paste review said "Celeste definitely works better as a game than as a thought-provoking exploration of mental illness" — a fair critique that the narrative execution is sometimes more earnest than sophisticated. But the characters — Madeline, the eccentric ghost hotel owner Oshiro, the cheerful traveler Theo — are consistently described as "lovable" or "easy to relate to" across reviews. The story is not a puzzle; you're not trying to decode it. It moves forward, introduces people, and earns a genuine ending. 11

Yes, if: You want a precision platformer where the difficulty comes from learning a consistent system rather than from memorizing arbitrary patterns. You're interested in a short game (8–10 hours) that has a well-paced story and a soundtrack worth listening to outside the game. You bounced off Hollow Knight because of backtracking but liked the idea of it.

With reservations, if: You're sensitive to repeated failure — Celeste does not go easy on the death count, and some screens in later chapters and especially the optional B/C-sides are genuinely punishing. Assist Mode is available and doesn't disable achievements, but if you need it for the main chapters, be prepared for the optional content to be out of reach.

Skip it, if: Precision platformers are a hard no for you and the mental health narrative isn't enough to override that. The game is almost entirely about the platforming — there's no combat, no open exploration, no RPG systems to fall back on. What it does, it does exceptionally well. What it doesn't do, it doesn't do at all.

Celeste is available on PC, Mac, Linux, Switch, PS4, and Xbox One. The base game and Farewell DLC are both available; Farewell is free and adds a ninth chapter that is harder than anything in the main game. 12