Celeste is a 2D precision platformer and one of the most celebrated indie games of its generation. The game was released and published in 2018 under the independent developers Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry’s studio, Matt Makes Games. It’s currently availible on PC and console, rated E10+, and aimed at players who want a mechanically demanding platformer with an engaging story, and I played it solo on PC. You play as Madeline, a young woman dealing with anxiety and depression who resolves to climb the supernatural Celeste Mountain as a way of proving something to herself. The mountain has the power to manifest a person’s internal fears into physical form, and Madeline’s internal turmoil personifies early on, spending most of the game sabotaging your progress. The arc isn’t about defeating that shadow but learning to carry it, and each chapter’s distinct visuals and characters make the mountain feel like an extension of Madeline’s internal state. To that end, the central argument I want to make is that Celeste creates investment in its world by aligning its formal mechanics and its narrative in the same direction, so that the constraints the game places on Madeline’s journey, the characters and manifestations she encounters on the mountain, and the arc she has to work through all reinforce each other, making the climb feel inseparable from the interal struggle it’s representing.
The formal difficulty of Celeste is constructed through deliberate scarcity of mechanics, as Madeline’s resource set is intentionally small: she can jump, wall-climb, and perform one mid-air dash before needing to touch the ground or a crystal to recharge. The rules strip away almost every buffer a platformer typically gives you, and the boundaries of each room are designed to make that single dash feel like the difference between making it and meeting your instant death. The mechanics don’t just make the game hard; they make you feel what Madeline feels on every attempt, a body that gets tired, that needs to reset, and can only push so far before it has to start again.
The visuals also reinforce this at every stage as the early chapters are open and legible, forest paths and snowy clearings with room to breathe.
As Madeline moves higher, the environments tighten and destabilize in ways that make you forget you are technically just climbing a mountain. The hotel chapter is the clearest example of this, as hazards lie at every corner, making it feel like a different game.
Each chapter introduces new mechanics and obstacles, so the experience never flatlines into repetition and keeps the player engaged with the story. The mountain keeps raising the stakes mechanically at the same pace that the narrative raises them emotionally.
The characters are doing the same work chapter by chapter, each one reflecting where Madeline is psychologically at that point in the climb. Granny’s early dismissal plants a seed of doubt that runs underneath everything that follows, and the warmth of other characters she meets along the way gives her just enough to keep going. But Mr. Oshiro is the most direct mirror the game offers, and the moment where narrative and mechanics hit their clearest intersection. Madeline genuinely tries to help him, motivated partly by wanting to prove she is a good person, but her shadow self surfaces mid-conversation and says exactly what she has been suppressing: that Oshiro’s hotel is a dump and he should let it go. It breaks him. What follows is a full boss chase sequence where Oshiro transforms into a raging specter and hunts Madeline through the hotel’s corridors (GIF), turning the chapter’s accumulated dread into pure mechanical panic.
The game earns that sequence because it spent the entire chapter building both characters toward it, so by the time you’re running for your life, you understand why he snapped and feel implicated in it. It is the clearest example of what Celeste does best: a moment where narrative and mechanical stakes land at the exact same time, leaving the player inside both simultaneously.
What makes the game shine beyond the main story is how it handles replayability through its B-Side system. Hidden cassette tapes scattered across puzzles in each chapter unlock harder remixed versions of that chapter’s levels, with entirely new visual palettes, music, and mechanical arrangements. 
These aren’t marketed as DLC or sold separately but are embedded in the world as objects to discover, treating extended content as part of the same exploration loop rather than a transaction outside it. Thinking back to the “content treadmill”, what Celeste does with B-Sides is more elegant as it structures the game as a sequence of arcs where the main story is one complete experience, but players who want more find an entirely separate arc already waiting inside the one they just finished.
Ethics:
Celeste fixes Madeline’s identity almost entirely: you can rename her, but her appearance, her arc, her anxiety, and her relationship to the mountain are immutable, and the body the game puts forward as the default site of struggle is a specific one: young, physically able, white-presenting, cisgender. The mechanics treat her mental health as biological and intrinsic, baked into her body in a way that the other characters’ traits simply are not. Mr. Oshiro, whose name and design signal Japanese heritage, is trapped by grief and circumstance rather than anything the game codes as innate, and that distinction matters. The game quietly places the psychological and biological weight of the story on its white protagonist while its characters of color exist largely without that kind of internal burden attached to their bodies. A meaningful mod would interrogate that distribution directly by letting players choose their character’s appearance, body type, and skin tone at the start, and then keeping the full character arcs the same to make the mechanics of struggle and growth race-neutral.
