4. Celeste (2018)
- Final score: 79 points
- Total placements: 5 lists
- Highest placement: #2, Casey
Casey writes:
Celeste is a forgiving game, even if it presents as a punishing one. It does challenge you to pull off some pretty tough things, but has many accommodations, both with the way your character moves and in the way the game is structured around saves and screens and replays, that encourages you to keep trying. The story is one about struggle and accomplishment, one that gets pretty emotional, and it amplifies that both mechanically and via one of the best video game soundtracks ever made. It has “secrets” that are pretty difficult to decode, unlocking a whole new end-game area that I still haven’t quite finished, and a set of free DLC levels gated behind that second end-game that I may never even play. Even so I have replayed the main game like 3 times since 2018, because just running through the basic levels is very satisfying.
There are ways in which the success of this collaboration have been frustrating for the people who made it, which is a shame: Lena Raine, the soundtrack composer, gets unhelpful feedback from people who want her to make more of the same thing on her other projects. Director/designer/writer/lead programmer Maddy Thorson has been pressured to litigate in public her own relationship with the game and her journey with gender identity and how those two connect in the years that followed the release of the game. Despite those struggles, there’s a wonderful fan community that speedruns the games, makes fan art, and even uses modding tools to build entirely new levels and mechanics to share with each other. There are professionally released piano covers of the music, and most of the original team collaborated last year to release a little tech demo exploring what a 3D Celeste game would be like. Not everything that’s good is 100% joyful, but I’m glad to see that the creators of this game seem to continue to cherish what is important to them about this game while pushing back in ways that they do not accept.