It has been a long time coming, but I finally made it through Celeste! Over the past few years, I have started and stopped this game multiple times. I first started playing it on PS4, got to Chapter 3, then gave up on it. Months later I picked it for the Switch, where I slowly chipped away at it but never dedicated myself to making any sort of meaningful progress, but eventually got to the end of Chapter 3 once again. I never felt that the game was too hard or unfair, I just kept being drawn away to games with more depth than a platformer. A few weeks back I decided to set my focus strictly on finishing Celeste once and for, all and I am really glad that I did. When I immersed myself fully I was finally able to see why this game is so beloved.

The art style in Celeste is beautiful. The graphics in the platforming sections have a simple but nice look to them, looking like an upscaled or more modernized retro game, which I felt worked really well for this gameplay style. Each chapter had its own distinct look and feel to it too which kept things fresh. I also really loved the portraits that were used during the dialogue segments. These were incredibly charming, and the artist did a wonderful job of imbuing the characters with a great level of personality and emotion.

The sound design throughout Celeste was great as well. The sound effects were fitting for the gameplay and the noises used in place of voices for the dialogue segments worked surprisingly well. The soundtrack was very catchy too and I almost always got a track stuck in my head after a play session.

I really enjoyed the story in Celeste, too. I won't go into it in detail here as I feel it is best to experience it yourself, but I found it to be well written, engaging, and pretty touching, too.

Where Celeste shines brightest is in its challenging but never unfair level design (though I have yet to attempt the B-sides so I can't vouch for their difficulty just yet). I died a lot in my playthrough (almost 1500 times), but these all seemed fair as it was my error that caused me to die, not cheap or poor level design. I always felt that the tough areas were made this way to test my skills and to push me to improve, not to punish me. It helped that the game's world is broken up into individual rooms, with each death resetting you back to the start of that room. This greatly reduced the feeling of frustration whenever I died and made it easy to keep on trying time and time again until I finally made it through to the end. It was such an exhilarating and satisfying feeling to make it through a particularly challenging room after so many failed attempts.

For how simple the gameplay was (jump, dash, grip), the gameplay always felt fresh, mostly because of clever level design, but also because of new mechanics that were introduced in each chapter. Most chapters were also concluded with a boss battle of sorts, which generally required quick reflexes and mastery of the chapter's new mechanics. I wish there had been more of these in the game, but the ones that were there offered a nice challenge and were incredibly satisfying to get through.

Celeste was an incredible experience. It was a very challenging game at times, but the feeling of satisfaction that I felt when overcoming a particularly tough section made it worth any of the stress and frustration. I died a lot, and I didn't find all that many of the collectibles (90/175 strawberries), but I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game. I'm unsure if I will ever go back to finish the B-side levels, but I probably will return from time to time to gather a few more of those missing collectibles.

It starts off seeming like the story is going to be all over the place, but eventually all loose ends are met and it works out just fine. It might seem daunting, following two separate accounts of the story simultaneously, but in reality, it's not a challenge to follow along at all. Even if you take some time away from playing the main story, there are recaps at the end of every other chapter to keep you in the loop.
Haven't done all of the side stories myself yet, but so far I've been enjoying them a lot. They can be incredibly silly and fun, and its a well needed contrast given the main storyline's darker nature.
I almost never cry over video games, but this game made me sob nearly three times... so if that doesn't tell you it's a good game I don't know what will.

man

Cancelled games are sad. Seeing, believing, and getting excited in a game that's supposed to release only to find out that it won't actually come out is never fun. Especially when you have a playable demo like P.T. This demo was a perfect marketing campaign; a horror game that is both intriguing and most of all SCARY. I remember thinking the graphics in PT were the most photorealistic thing I had ever seen at that point, and the unexplained looping nature and bizarre secrets kept the game in this unidentifiable zone where the only thing I could keep thinking was "what IS this game???" Then the demo ends revealing what it actually was to be. A new entry in the silent hill series directed by hideo kojima. In one free demo, pretty much everyone who had played it was already sold on this game that was going to come out.

and then they cancelled it, fired kojima, and made the game not only delisted, but actually UNREDOWNLOADABLE which to this day is the literal only piece of console software that I have seen like this. Konami made it so even if you did take place in playing the original game and have the demo on your account, tough shit bro hope you already had it downloaded. Hope your PS4 doesn't break. Hope you don't change HDDs. Hope you never upgrade or need to system transfer. Obliterated from the timeline, unless you still have it downloaded or have a hacked system to sideload the game. Great. Thanks, Konami.