Celeste is a game about climbing a mountain. From what I observe generally, people see that, play it, get to the Summit chapter, conclude with "yeah that was pretty good, a bit heavy-handed with the main metaphor, but it was pleasant enough" and move on. Maybe they'll try some B-side bonus content, maybe they'll play a bit of the PICO-8 original, but most people I've seen are happy enough leaving that as the experience. The story is over, right? Why keep playing? She had to overcome the mountain, and she did just that. That's the end of it.

But what if you kept going?

What if you came back with the 4 Crystal Hearts for Chapter 8, with Madeline revisiting the mountain an in-game year later? She had no real reason for being there in the first place, and now she's there again. Why are you still there and not playing something else? Was it the gameplay that was so intricately crafted, Maddy's still updating it years later to improve the feel on a microscopic level? Lena Raine's shimmering arpeggios? The friendly cast of faces Madeline met with, brought to life with voices that were actually ridiculously elaborate in implementation? A perhaps too simple and saccharine approach to mental health draped in pastel colours, that made for a warm and relatable enough environment you could maybe appreciate nonetheless? Even from this game's biggest detractors, I still usually hear "it's so polished tho". The amount of care that went into Celeste fires through on all cylinders.

Okay, but what if you just kept going.

What if you did all the B-sides. And now the C-sides. Every strawberry. The golden strawberries too maybe? That one achievement where you get 6 strawberries back to back? Speedruns? Custom levels?

Completionism is pretty normal territory for people that really like a game, and Farewell muscles its way in as one more thing to check off the list. Some time long ago, Celeste stopped being a game primarily about climbing a mountain for these people, as they had found themselves consumed in every bit of the experience. Trying to fill that cake Madeline bakes at the end with as many strawberries as they could. Really milking that climbing action.

Not moving on.

So isn't it funny that Farewell's a story about grief, pelting Madeline every few minutes with "hey, you should move on now"? Part of Her gives up with reasoning as to why she shouldn't be using her psychic mountain climbing powers to spend the entire chapter chasing after a bird. She met Granny, she climbed that mountain, these were events in the past. She should just move on now. You're still playing Celeste, named after the mountain you're meant to be climbing, even though you painstakingly covered every inch of it already. "The mountain looks like a molehill from here," she remarks, even though you're still playing Celeste.

Madeline contorts herself in dashes and obscure movement techs, in order to scrape through the most pulverising screens the game now has to offer, because you just can't get enough of the climb. Even when there's no mountain left, when she's lost in dreams of exploding puffer fish, flying jellyfish (...green moose, guava juice), as the game is throwing literally every gimmick you've seen up to this point while introducing new shit at the 11th hour, glitching out, putting up barriers, demanding wavedash finesse, it's hard to stop playing. I quite like it giving you a Crystal Heart that doesn't count at one point, to tie together the completionism with grief further. "Empty Space". Maybe depicting grief with even more shmovement than dysphoria depression and anxiety in the main game might be just as whitewashy, or worse. It still feels well-intentioned enough, ending on a really sweet note, and there's no "omg selfies #buzzed YOLOOO!!" talk going on this time. Sorry Theo.

Farewell is a message to those fans ultimately. Not the ones that just dipped after beating it, but the ones that really exhausted that damn mountain. It was originally intended to be played after beating every C-side, though it pops up innocuously for anyone newly done with Chapter 8, only unceremoniously gating them halfway through (and requiring 15 Crystal Hearts, as opposed to 23). This is maybe my biggest complaint, as the only warning sign here saying "hey, maybe don't play this until you've worked through all the content?" prior to that is the fact that Madeline is just chilling in the 7C scenery upon starting it — something only people that already played 7C would catch onto.

Despite the stellar rating curve on the left there (which I suspect has some survivor bias), I'd say Farewell is a bit more polarising in how it's been received, judging from people's reactions online. It's obscenely difficult and seriously expects you to master some fairly obscure movement, introduced with as much grace as exploding fish to the face, as per how I expect the average experience went for a lot of people:

"Oh cool, I unlocked Ch 9 after beating Ch 8."
"Why is this so fucking hard? What is all this shit?"
"I need FIFTEEN HEARTS to get past that gate? After all that?"
(if they actually went and did that) "This game has WAVEDASHING??"

Such a clumsy way of going "oh anyone can play this but uh, actually no, sorry. It's for the hardcore fans lol". Farewell just ends up recontextualising all that "optional" stuff as a much more integral part of the game. It's titled and presented in such a way that anyone can clearly see that this is now that resolving piano chord at the end of it all, giving Celeste an air of finality, but its deceptive title of "Chapter 9" just works against it when there's a sea of content directly preceding it.

Despite all of that though, I'm confident in saying that this is my favourite part of Celeste. The twinkly luminous environs, the music ebbing back and forth from foreign to familiar as new motifs are weaved in with old... Madeline's just zooming, wavedashing, wallbouncing off of the most disjunct objects in this spaced out dreamy... aquarium... techno-observatory? I love how that visual style comes together when there are like 4 different themes being patchworked together. Every 5 seconds you're demanded to do some nebulous, evil oneiro-parkour, but you can't stop. You made it this far and you're not missing that last screen, damn it. Dash, dash, scrape against spikes, die. Just in this zen stupor, set to these spaced out surroundings, retooling yourself again and again. This was my 3rd playthrough of this game over the last 5 years, and my 2nd time ending on Farewell. It really truly feels wrong to me to actually stop playing at any point before Farewell. It's one of the most beautiful endings to any game I've played, and one I keep feeling eager to come back to in spite of thousands of deaths.

Happy 5th anniversary Celeste. Farewell for now.

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A couple notes:

- I don't actually know why this is listed separately on IGDB. It's literally a free update and part of every Celeste copy, and you can't play it separately lol. I appreciate it because it feels disconnected and separate enough to the main narrative, but it'd be like if the third semester in Persona 5 Royal got its own page. That shit would have like a 4.9 average. Scary.

- They're very different ultimately, but the whole experience of physics-platforming as a girl in a surreal dream world and constantly being met with the most devious screens makes me think of Umihara Kawase. That game/series is awesome and I'd recommend checking it out if you haven't. More games like this please.