This week, I played Celeste, a single-player platformer game that’s available on Switch, Desktop, XBox, and Playstation. It was developed in 2018 by indie studio Maddy Makes Games and has a reputation for being difficult and narrative-driven, making the game appealing to gamers who enjoy challenge and narrative. The game has an optional assist mode that makes it more accessible to younger players as well as those who are less skilled in platformer games, however, due to the nature of the storyline, younger players may have difficulty understanding its nuances and may enjoy the mechanics more.
In Celeste, players have to jump, dash, and climb to progress from the left side to the right side of the screen, and then a new part of the world opens up for players to explore. Celeste encourages players to get to know the world by normalizing death, which creates a gaming experience that’s self-motivated and exploratory. The game either constantly reminds you of your deaths or encourages you to die through its difficult gameplay. Beginning with the homescreen, when you open your save, you are faced with some reminders of your status in the game: total gameplay time, name, current level, how many strawberries you have (an in-game resource), and how many deaths you have. Through utilizing hierarchy in visual design, the death count is displayed just as prominently as your total playtime or number of strawberries, which places death front and center as a core part of the experience.
As you progress through the game, strawberries will begin to appear as an optional resource that you can collect. From my research, collecting them only leads to bragging rights and slightly alternate dialogue in a later chapter. Collecting them is often challenging and may lead to death, which creates a dynamic where players have to be self-motivated and willing to experiment more with navigating the world to collect strawberries, which enhances challenge, discover, and even abnegation as players can get easily lost in trying to get every single strawberry they encounter. In the screenshot below, getting the strawberry is obviously precarious because it’s right above spikes that can kill you, so players have to manuever very carefully in order to not die and make it back up to proceed to the next screen.
The spikes pictured are just one of the many architectural features that make the game challenging. Sometimes a screen can look impossible to traverse because of how many dangers are present, in times like this, I found myself just experimenting and smashing the keys to see where I end up. Through moments like this, I explored the world in haphazard ways and gradually refined my jumping and dashing skills while undergoing many interaction loops. The fact that dying has no detrimental impact to the gameplay made me feel much more comfortable with exploring, since I just respawn immediately. By the end of my playthrough, I felt good with the basic manuevers and started to refine the skill chain where I jump and dash to move upward diagonally. Even though I didn’t play the game for very long, I explored the world that I saw thoroughly by dying in silly ways and also in depesration. This game keeps you on your toes and will find new ways to kill you as you’re exploring through its wide variety of architecture!
I played without assist mode and struggled immensely with the mechanics since I’ve never played a platformer game before. Because of this difficulty, I wasn’t able to progress very far in the narrative. Because challenge is a central pillar to the game, I can see how some players could be discouraged easily. Thinking about interaction loops again, I think the quick ramp up in difficulty (quite literally within 5-10 screens) can prevent new players from investing in the game, because interaction loops may actually look more like spirals where initial loops are shorter and gradually get longer as players grow comfortable with investing more time into the game and its mechanics. To reduce this hesitancy in players, I feel that assist mode can be on as a default instead of a opt-in feature so less-skilled players are automatically eased into the gameplay and can refine core skills without feeling demotivated in their initial gameplay experience.
Similarly, Minecraft is also a worldbuilding game in which death is normalized. When a player dies, the player can choose whether they want to respawn with an empty inventory or return to the title screen. However, because of the game’s robustness of resources and focus on building, players have a greater incentive to not die to preserve their resources, making death less normalized than it is in Celeste. We see this built into the game with the various armor, weapons, potions, and more that can be used to protect one’s health and prevent one from dying. Comparing Celeste and Minecraft shows how resources (or the lack of) can lead to the prioritization of different kinds of in-game objectives that exist alongside exploration, which ultimately impacts how players value their ‘lives’. This is a fascinating example of the “magic circle” as players’ perception of death is often much more relaxed and nonchalant compared to in real life.
Though I wasn’t able to learn much about the game’s narrative because I only played (badly) for an hour, through research and reading a post made by the creator, I learned that Madeline, the protagonist, is actually canonically trans. However, this lore wasn’t introduced until the DLC release in 2019. On a sidenote, I really appreciate the DLC being free, which isn’t super common with games (EA’s Sims comes to mind as a notorious offender for squeezing money out of people with their expansion packs), as it makes this lore accessible to all players who have purchased the game. Reading about the the creator addressing the community’s past efforts and pointed questions in seeking clarification on Madeline’s identity, I definitely sympathized with her. It raises questions about what players are entitled to when playing a game and at what point can questions about the game and its narrative can start being negative and invasive. As players, it’s easy to assume that the creators have all the answers to the game that they made, but with the case of Celeste, that was clearly not true. The creator Maddy was undergoing her own journey regarding her gender as she was making the game and its DLC; she needed time to process and figure things out while players were playing and digesting the narrative that she created. Although creators may have social responsibility in ensuring that the narratives they create and choose to share do not do any harm and represent marginalized groups properly, it’s important to remember that no one is perfect and has all the answers. They can’t anticipate and predict gaps within their narratives and we should be mindful of that as players.
