For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to improve my mental health, trying to be content with my loneliness and tried out meditating. Celeste is a game that im already familiar with, it's the 3rd time im playing this game and yet it struck a chord with me due to my growth as a person and the overall circumstances that im in.

Celeste is a game about overcoming personal struggles, exploring emotional trauma and how we come to terms with ourselves, climbing the mountain is just a metaphor for it and i think it nails on the execution part from its premise, character, gameplay, and conclusion. It’s a story about a girl name Madeline, trying to scale a mountain because it's something she must do. Little do we know that Madeline is battling with her own mental problems such as depression and anxiety, which all the more reason she must climb this mountain. Overcoming your own personal struggles isn’t an easy task, it’s a repetitive cycle of ups and downs. In Celeste, Madeline’s depression and anxiety manifest itself into a physical body known as a part of her, who constantly tries to tell her to give up and go home. This part of her will continue to follow her, appearing between chapters still trying to convince her to go home while being distasteful towards others, this part of her is essentially everything Madeline hates about herself. There are also other characters like Theo, whose climbing the mountain for some social media pics. The interaction between our main character and Theo are like a breath of fresh air after the intense chapters we went through. I especially adore the interaction at the start of chapter 6 where they discuss about their purpose for climbing the mountain, family, and their mental health, probably the most meaningful conversation a game has presented from its music, dialogue, and atmosphere.

The gameplay of Celeste is one might say difficult but it functions with its themes and message it’s trying to tell. It’s a simple platformer with a pretty simple mechanic. There’s the jump button, a climb button which you can use to climb walls until you ran out of stamina, and there’s the dash button. But what makes it work even more is the death system. In Celeste, we don’t have lives for each chapter we play, instead we get infinite lives, we only respawn on the same room, and it even shows us the death counter when we finished a chapter. How does this relate to its core message of the game? Like i mentioned before, Celeste is a game about overcoming, overcoming the same obstacles we face, overcoming that repetitiveness, and when you overcame it, there’s that satisfying feeling you feel when you do it Combined with it’s unique and distinct level designs that also adds variety how we overcome those obstacles, but also making Celeste mountain a pretty mysterious place. It came to the conclusion that Celeste is a pretty rewarding game to beat from a narrative and gameplay point of view especially when you reach the summit.

The confrontation between Madeline and Part of Herself in the same chapter is an important point for Madeline’s character development as Madeline tries to push away that part of her saying that she doesn’t need her anymore which only angers her and it says a lot how some people treat themselves, sometimes they’re in denial about their own feelings, nobody’s perfect in this world and there will always something that we dislike about ourselves. Angered by Madeline’s words, she pushed her down from the mountain. This is the point where Madeline has hit rock bottom and must climb all over again but what she does different this time is that how she confronts this Part of Herself, not without the desire to push her away, but with the intent of accepting her, embracing that part of herself as who she truly is, becoming together as one again.

The final chapter of Celeste is probably the most difficult one out of all the other chapters, it’s basically the final test to see how far you’ve learned with a much difficult and precise obstacle until you reach the summit of Celeste Mountain. The summit is probably the quiet moment in the game with barely any music yet it feels so peaceful, it’s like the game is trying to tell you “Hey, you made it, let’s enjoy this moment for a bit” and that’s exactly how it felt. All of those failures, struggles, and hardship of climbing the mountain but most importantly how you were able to find the resolve and motivation to walk through and overcome yourself. It is a personal catharsis that this game could provide, i even took a picture of me reaching the summit (lol).

In conclusion, Celeste is a game that forever will be a favorite of mine, while i do think it feels a bit short in its gameplay, the message and themes it’s trying to tell will forever stick out with me. It teaches us that we all have our own complex motivations and problems but it also told us to be patience with ourselves, to be persevere, to not push away a part of ourselves because when you’re able to be patient and accept who you are, you’ll be able to have the strength to overcome any hurdle in life, and there is no greater feeling than being able to reach the summit.