Celeste first playthrough, part 1
3After pondering what to play next on weeknights, I figured heck with it, this will either be the best or worst decision I've ever made.
Celeste has been at the front of my mind a lot lately, largely thanks to watching Shoujo's livestreams on Twitch, where she's been playing a lot of Strawberry Jam, has recently played a couple of SMW romhacks also by Maddy, and has even been using the Celeste MSU-1 patch for Link to the Past randomizers.
While I certainly don't expect to ever be capable of completing higher-tier lobbies in collabs, I've heard from enough folks that vanilla Celeste is extremely intentional with its level design and difficulty curve, and it clearly has a very tight retry loop. My past experience with 2D precision platformers is not great - a decade ago I watched Super Meat Boy gameplay, played half a world myself, and peaced out - but more recently I have played a few other types of games with tight replay loops, such as Neon White, which I enjoyed the crap out of. So I went into Celeste feeling optimistic about at least enjoying the initial climb.
Celeste immediately makes strong first impressions with its sound/music and art design. Despite the low-res graphic style, there's a ton of work put into character states/animations, and the game doesn't waste time getting the player a little worked up practically before it even begins.
In this first segment I've played through 3 areas so far, and they clearly incorporate new mechanics and ramp up the difficulty, but nothing has felt insurmountable. The only mandatory difficulty spike I'd call out so far was one surprisingly long room near the end of the third area; any other difficulty spikes have involved collecting strawberries, which the game calls out up-front as optional.
I'm also interested to see where the plot of the game goes. It's moving on at a reasonable clip chapter-by-chapter so far. I'm certainly interested to keep playing.
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