Celeste | Code Like It's 198x

Celeste is a very hard platform game that tells its players it is fine to need help. Its heroine, Madeline, climbs a mountain while struggling with anxiety and with a dark double of herself, and the game around her is a long run of single screens full of spikes, each to be crossed with a jump, a climb and one dash in mid-air. It also has an assist mode that can slow the game down or make Madeline invincible. Its creator, Maddy Thorson, admitted that she had been the person on the team most against it: “It felt like a betrayal of the precious experience I was designing.”

Fast facts

Developer: Matt Makes Games, since renamed Maddy Makes Games; the team later worked as Extremely OK Games. Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry were the game’s two programmers.
Art: Pedro Medeiros and Amora Bettany. Music: Lena Raine.
Released: 25 January 2018, for Windows, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Origin: Celeste Classic, made in four days for a game jam on the PICO-8 fantasy console in 2015.
Awards: Best Independent Game and Games for Impact, The Game Awards, December 2018.

From PICO-8 to a mountain

Celeste began as a game jam entry. Thorson and Berry made Celeste Classic in four days on PICO-8, a “fantasy console”: an imaginary computer, deliberately limited, with a 128×128 screen, 16 fixed colours and 32K cartridges. “We used pretty much all our resources for this,” Berry wrote when he posted it in July 2015: “8186/8192 code, the entire spritemap, the entire map, and 63/64 sounds.” It had only 30 levels, but Wireframe noted that it already had the red-haired climber, her mid-air dash, the mountain and the strawberries. The full game hides a playable copy of Classic on a computer inside one of its levels.

Thorson described the full game’s design as a “fractal story”: the team worked out the story, split it into chapters, split the chapters into sections and the sections into rooms. “The placement and design of rooms was primarily determined by [their] place in the larger story of the chapter,” she said, “how Madeline feels and what kind of pacing helps to support that.” The story is told mostly through the rooms. There are no enemies wandering to and fro, Wireframe pointed out, no Goombas; the mountain is the opponent.

How Madeline moves

Madeline can run, jump, cling to walls and climb, and dash once in mid-air before she lands again. Crystals in the air give her the dash back so she can chain several across a chasm. Strawberries sit in places that can only be reached by a run of exact jumps and dashes, a dare that the player can ignore, and each chapter has a much harder “B-side”.

The developers published Madeline’s own code, the C# class that controls her, and it shows how finely tuned she is. A dash lasts 0.15 seconds. A jump still works for a tenth of a second after she has run off a ledge, a grace period that saves players from jumps that feel unfair. Her climbing stamina is 110 units: climbing upwards burns 100 of them in 2.2 seconds, and clinging still burns 10 a second. Writing in Wireframe, the developer Matthew Taylor pointed out that the file was “an ugly player script with over 5000 lines of code” that “breaks every clean coding principle you can think of. And it’s perfect.” The developers’ note that came with it agreed it could be cleaner, and explained why they kept the player’s behaviour in one big file: “In a platformer like Celeste, the player behavior code needs to be very tightly ordered and tuned.”

Death is quick and frequent. A loading screen tells the player: “Be proud of your death count! The more you die, the more you’re learning. Keep going!”

The assist mode

Assist mode lets the player change the game speed, give Madeline infinite stamina or more dashes, up to an unlimited number, or make her invincible. Thorson changed her mind about it after watching people of different skill levels play. “It began to feel obvious that the assist mode would be a positive addition if we did it with care,” she told Wireframe in 2022. The game already let strong players make it harder through strawberries and B-sides; “I’ve come to see assist mode as an extension of that, implemented in a more explicit way and covering the lower end of the difficulty spectrum.” Traditional difficulty levels would have meant redesigning and retesting every level for each, which the team ruled “an unworkable solution”. Wireframe called Celeste “the poster child” of a new wave of games rethinking difficulty, and Nintendo Life found the assist mode “unintrusive, highly customisable and excellently implemented”.

Madeline

The mountain is a way of telling Madeline’s story. She is fighting anxiety and depression, and on the climb she meets her other self, Badeline: her inner demons, as Wireframe put it, made literal. Wireframe called the game “a challenging and unexpectedly moving fable about mental health”. In 2020 Thorson wrote that Madeline is a trans woman, and that she herself is trans. “During Celeste’s development, I did not know that Madeline or myself were trans,” she wrote. “During the Farewell DLC’s development, I began to form a hunch.” Farewell, a final chapter added after release, ends with small hints on Madeline’s desk.

Reception and later history

Nintendo Life gave it 10/10, and PC World called it “the best precision platformer in years”. At The Game Awards in December 2018 it won Best Independent Game and Games for Impact, and was nominated for Game of the Year. It was also nominated for several BAFTAs in 2019, including Best Game and Music, without winning.

The team went on to call itself Extremely OK Games and began work on Earthblade, carrying over what Celeste had taught them: “Difficulty is an ever-present consideration for us,” Thorson said. For the game’s sixth anniversary in January 2024 the original team made Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain, a small 3D game built “in under 2 weeks”, and released its source code.

Sources

Wireframe issue 59, January 2022, pp. 70–72, Jon Bailes, “The New Normal”: Thorson on the assist mode, B-sides and strawberries, the cost of difficulty levels; Madeline’s anxiety and depression; Badeline; Earthblade.
Wireframe issue 12, April 2019, p. 20: PICO-8’s specification; Celeste Classic, made in four days for a game jam, with 30 levels; the hidden copy in the full game.
Noel Berry, “Celeste”, Lexaloffle BBS, 21 July 2015 (web): the four days and the resources used. https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2145
Wireframe issue 49, March 2021, p. 40: strawberries; Thorson on the “fractal story” and the placement of rooms.
Wireframe issue 51, May 2021, p. 110: a fixed-screen platformer; climbing, the dash and the crystals that renew it; strawberries; Extremely OK Games.
Wireframe issue 30, January 2020, p. 24: no enemies; “a challenging and unexpectedly moving fable about mental health”.
Wireframe issue 14, May 2019, p. 35, Matthew Taylor: the 5,000-line player script.
Maddy Makes Games, Celeste repository on GitHub (web): Source/Player/Player.cs and its notes (dash time, jump grace time, climbing stamina, assist options, two programmers, why one big file), and the C# port of Celeste Classic; MIT licence. https://github.com/NoelFB/Celeste
Celeste official website (web): credits. http://www.celestegame.com/
Steam store page (web, secondary): release date and platforms. https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/
Jon Cousins, Celeste review, Nintendo Life, 26 January 2018 (web, secondary): 10/10; Matt Makes Games; the assist mode. https://www.nintendolife.com/reviews/switch-eshop/celeste
Hayden Dingman, Celeste review, PC World, 3 February 2018 (web, secondary): “Be proud of your death count!”; “the best precision platformer in years”. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3252820/gaming/celeste-review.html
Gematsu, “The Game Awards 2018 winners announced”, 7 December 2018; Nintendo Life, 7 December 2018 (web, secondary): Best Independent Game, Games for Impact, the Game of the Year nomination. https://www.gematsu.com/2018/12/the-game-awards-2018-winners-announced
Shacknews, “All 2019 BAFTA Games Awards winners”, 4 April 2019 (web, secondary): nominations. https://www.shacknews.com/article/111055/all-2019-bafta-games-awards-winners
Maddy Thorson, “Is Madeline Canonically Trans?”, November 2020 (web). https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/is_maddy_trans/index.html
Maddy Makes Games, Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain repository on GitHub, January 2024 (web): the source, MIT licence for the Source folder. https://github.com/EXOK/Celeste64