This was a very pleasant surprise. I absolutely love the concept, aesthetic, and music. I had a good time overall, this is much more enjoyable than the PICO-8 Celeste games in my opinion, but I do feel like it has some shortcomings in controls and polish that I wanted to talk about. These aren't a huge deal for a very short game made in a week, but I just think it's interesting.
There's some clear issues with the controls, particularly relating to the camera, that become much more obvious doing some of the more difficult B-Sides. Edges of platforms also feel particularly slippery where I feel like other games would be more generous, and Madeline is all too eager to perform a ledge climb when moving along a wall even when there are spikes on top that will instantly kill you. Many of the jumps in this game require a lot of active camera management to see where you're going, and since you also want your thumb on the face buttons to be able to dash mid-air you're constantly moving your grip back and forth. There are no control options whatsoever, and in most games I'd settle for being able to put dash on a shoulder button. I generally think taking common actions off of the face buttons in games that use both analog sticks is a good idea and fully solves a lot of issues like this, but here it feels like it would still be a band-aid solution.
The problems with the camera go deeper. For one thing, I think putting the ability to zoom in and out on the right stick's Y-axis was a mistake, you're not going to be getting perfectly horizontal inputs every time you want to turn the camera, so over the course of a series of jumps with quick camera turns you can find the camera at a very different angle than you intended. This is especially annoying since the camera doesn't reset when you respawn and you almost always have to adjust it before each attempt at a section. It's also often very hard to judge distance, I found myself under or overshooting small platforms a lot of the time. I've played a lot of 3D platformers and this is not an issue I usually have, and I had to think for a bit about what the actual cause is, which I think comes down to a couple of things. I think the developers realized this problem as well, since they included a very exaggerated guide that's enabled by default, rather than the traditional shadow below your character there's also a dotted line that extends from you to the ground. I don't think this solves the issue however.
The camera does a lot less automated movement than the average 3D platformer. In Super Mario 64 the developers only had a single analog stick to work with, and were also designing for players new to 3D games entirely, so they made the camera movement largely automatic, keeping it at a good angle behind Mario as he moved, with buttons left only for larger adjustments. Even with the move to dual-analog controllers, most 3D platformers since have largely copied this behavior. Celeste 64 seems to expect the player to do a lot more of this camerawork on their own, which is a decision I can understand sounding good on paper but doesn't really work in this genre. An interesting side-effect of this is that I think a lot of how distance is perceived is through seeing the edges of objects or textures move as the camera moves, and when the camera is at a locked angle even though the player is moving this makes the scene appear flat.
While fixing that problem would go a long way, I think there's also just an inherent issue with the amount of air control expected from Celeste's mechanics when applied to a 3D space. Most 3D platformers give you a lot of control in how you start your jump, but once you're in the air you're mostly just expected to make minor adjustments to ensure you land in the right spot. Completely changing your trajectory in the air and having to use that precisely is a lot more challenging, and even as someone who has played many difficult platformers I think that type of challenge is more awkward than it is fun. It's still probably possible to make a better-controlling game around this idea, with a better camera and level design that keeps this in mind and tries to avoid the awkward situations, but I think this game shows how difficult that would be to make properly.
While I mainly focused on negatives so far, I did have a very nice time with this overall. The play area feels packed with secrets and I was really impressed with the number of B-Sides. The ideas taken from Mario and the way they're implemented is great, I love the inclusion of 64's side-jump, and the short B-Side levels as secrets fit in great with the more open exploration. Like I mentioned at the start the game looks and sounds great, especially so for something put together so quickly. For something that took me under 3 hours to 100% the downsides are easy to overlook, and I had a really fun time with it.
There's some clear issues with the controls, particularly relating to the camera, that become much more obvious doing some of the more difficult B-Sides. Edges of platforms also feel particularly slippery where I feel like other games would be more generous, and Madeline is all too eager to perform a ledge climb when moving along a wall even when there are spikes on top that will instantly kill you. Many of the jumps in this game require a lot of active camera management to see where you're going, and since you also want your thumb on the face buttons to be able to dash mid-air you're constantly moving your grip back and forth. There are no control options whatsoever, and in most games I'd settle for being able to put dash on a shoulder button. I generally think taking common actions off of the face buttons in games that use both analog sticks is a good idea and fully solves a lot of issues like this, but here it feels like it would still be a band-aid solution.
The problems with the camera go deeper. For one thing, I think putting the ability to zoom in and out on the right stick's Y-axis was a mistake, you're not going to be getting perfectly horizontal inputs every time you want to turn the camera, so over the course of a series of jumps with quick camera turns you can find the camera at a very different angle than you intended. This is especially annoying since the camera doesn't reset when you respawn and you almost always have to adjust it before each attempt at a section. It's also often very hard to judge distance, I found myself under or overshooting small platforms a lot of the time. I've played a lot of 3D platformers and this is not an issue I usually have, and I had to think for a bit about what the actual cause is, which I think comes down to a couple of things. I think the developers realized this problem as well, since they included a very exaggerated guide that's enabled by default, rather than the traditional shadow below your character there's also a dotted line that extends from you to the ground. I don't think this solves the issue however.
The camera does a lot less automated movement than the average 3D platformer. In Super Mario 64 the developers only had a single analog stick to work with, and were also designing for players new to 3D games entirely, so they made the camera movement largely automatic, keeping it at a good angle behind Mario as he moved, with buttons left only for larger adjustments. Even with the move to dual-analog controllers, most 3D platformers since have largely copied this behavior. Celeste 64 seems to expect the player to do a lot more of this camerawork on their own, which is a decision I can understand sounding good on paper but doesn't really work in this genre. An interesting side-effect of this is that I think a lot of how distance is perceived is through seeing the edges of objects or textures move as the camera moves, and when the camera is at a locked angle even though the player is moving this makes the scene appear flat.
While fixing that problem would go a long way, I think there's also just an inherent issue with the amount of air control expected from Celeste's mechanics when applied to a 3D space. Most 3D platformers give you a lot of control in how you start your jump, but once you're in the air you're mostly just expected to make minor adjustments to ensure you land in the right spot. Completely changing your trajectory in the air and having to use that precisely is a lot more challenging, and even as someone who has played many difficult platformers I think that type of challenge is more awkward than it is fun. It's still probably possible to make a better-controlling game around this idea, with a better camera and level design that keeps this in mind and tries to avoid the awkward situations, but I think this game shows how difficult that would be to make properly.
While I mainly focused on negatives so far, I did have a very nice time with this overall. The play area feels packed with secrets and I was really impressed with the number of B-Sides. The ideas taken from Mario and the way they're implemented is great, I love the inclusion of 64's side-jump, and the short B-Side levels as secrets fit in great with the more open exploration. Like I mentioned at the start the game looks and sounds great, especially so for something put together so quickly. For something that took me under 3 hours to 100% the downsides are easy to overlook, and I had a really fun time with it.