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.

Go play Dark Souls III or Sekiro instead. There are 2 good bosses in the game: Malenia and Rennala. The rest are an absolute mess of game design, easy, or just plain annoying. Soul of Cinder, despite not even being the best boss in Dark Souls III, is an absolute masterpiece of game design in comparison to whatever the fuck the final boss of Elden Ring is.

It's a shame because the overworld is quite fun to explore and the souls formula adapts pretty well to an open world format, but holy fuck is the rest of the game bad. Reused bosses (I've killed Godskin Apostle 5 times), artificial difficulty spikes by boosting health or damage of mobs/bosses, poor balance, lack of planning around certain builds, bosses become trivial with certain builds.

Elden Ring's boss design fails on both the perspective of a new player, and the perspective of a returning veteran. Everything I say is going to be in direct comparison to Dark Souls III which has a great difficulty curve and very enjoyable and memorable bosses.

As a new player, you require the game to teach you how to play itself. This isn't true for everyone, some people enjoy die and retry games, which admittedly souls games are, but there are a few a effective ways of playing Souls games that players would learn if they started with Dark Souls III. When starting Dark Souls III, you are greeted with three encounters. Iundex Gundyr, who isn't that amazing, but his purpose is something akin to showing the player how they will die and bosses will be challenging. As a new player to beat this boss you have to learn how to roll from attacks, or how to block and punish. Block/dodge and punish is the main way of dealing damage to bosses. The second encounter, Vordt, is the first colossal boss you'd face and what you will learn from Vordt is aggressively rolling behind a boss. I remember dying to Vordt a few times before friends told me to stick to his ass. The third encounter, a choice between Crystal Sages and Deacons of the Deep (both suck tbh) or the Abyss Watchers, is where a new player would seriously learn to watch for patterns, learn when to punish, and learn how to position themselves in regards to the boss, which is what is required to beat the Abyss Watchers.
In Elden Ring, you're greeted with Tree Sentinel who is hard to kill if you've never played a souls game, and lowsy dungeon bosses which effectively teach you nothing and aren't memorable. There wasn't a single boss in Elden Ring that I remember having deliberate pattern designs for the player to overcome in a specific way, other than Malenia. This is the price of freedom of gameplay, and this always leads to cheese. I could have easily beaten most of the major bosses by summoning a mimic or Luthel, popping my infinite mana physik, and doing Comet Azur. There are a few bosses designed with cheese in mind, like Rennala being a challenge (as a magic user) even if you summon something or Malenia dodging 90% of what you throw at her, but I am certain that Elden Ring doesn't teach you how to play souls games properly. There is always something you can do to make an encounter easier, you can easily respec, summons are op, spells are op, most builds are op, you can stagger most bosses with few strikes with str and dex builds, e.t.c. I'm sure new players can still enjoy the game, but they would have a hard time when trying out others in the line up.

As a returning player, what you're looking for in souls game is a fair challenge. You've had an excellent example of ramping and balanced difficulty in Dark Souls III, you've been through challenging and rewarding bosses, and Elden Ring falls flat on its face when it comes to providing a fair challenge, either with unfair bosses, either with not challenging bosses. I had to actively limit myself by not cheesing bosses with my magic beam and by not summoning to make the game challenging, and even then, most bosses were easy until you get to Maliketh or so. I will admit, up to Caelid, I was enjoying the game. After Radahn, I was hit with the classic more health more damage and would get two shot with 40 vitality, as well as bosses that are just roll to the side and wait, roll to the side and wait, rince repeat. Malenia is an excellent boss exactly for this reason, her attacks are hard to dodge, you have to react to them most of the time, Waterflow Dance will hit you, and to add insult to injury, she heals when she hits you, so you try your best to get every single hit in, and guess what, you get rewarded for it because you can stagger her. Malenia rewards well timed braveness, and god damn is it satisfying to dodge Waterflow Dance. After beating her you feel like you've climbed over a massive hurdle, like you could go back to earlier bosses and kick their ass because you've effectively gotten better at the game. This isn't to say that Malenia can't be cheap or can't be cheesed, she outright dies to str and dex builds because of stagger, but she's an excellent example of how bosses should be made. You should be rewarded for learning patterns, reacting, and punishing when necessary, you shouldn't be fucked over by RNG when punishing because the boss decided to prolongue his attack or delayed an attack AHEM RADAGON AHEM, a boss shouldn't just throw shit at you for long periods of time, a boss should challenge you as a player and require you to use everything you've learned up so far to beat them. This is what Elden Ring lacked.

It's as if nobody from Fromsoft playtested the damn game.