Celeste — Lemma

Celeste is a 2D precision platformer developed by the Canadian studio Maddy Makes Games and released on January 25, 2018, in which the player guides a young woman named Madeline up the supernatural Celeste Mountain.² ⁴ The game was directed and written by , who together with Noel Berry led development as programmers, with Lena Raine composing the music and Berry, Amora Bettany, Gabby DaRienzo, and Pedro Medeiros contributing art.² ⁵ It launched on the , PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via , itch.io, and the Epic Games Store.⁶ ⁸ The Switch edition is a 1.5 GB download rated E10+ by the ESRB for fantasy violence, alcohol reference, and mild language, and sells digitally for $19.99.⁶

The studio behind the game was previously known as Matt Makes Games and later Maddy Makes Games before settling on Extremely OK Games, and had earlier made the multiplayer game .² ⁸ Celeste Mountain takes its name from a real mountain in Canada, where the studio is based.² The game’s full credits also list Power Up Audio and Heidy Motta among its collaborators.⁸

Origins

Celeste began as a prototype built for the PICO-8 fantasy console during a game jam before growing into a full commercial product.² The original PICO-8 version, called Celeste Classic, remains playable inside the finished game as a hidden unlockable, and is also distributed separately.² ⁸ The transition from the original studio name Matt Makes Games to Maddy Makes Games accompanied the developer’s own change, and the game’s protagonist later became central to discussions of the studio’s identity.²

Gameplay

The game is built around climbing, and its central mechanic is a mid-air dash: while airborne, Madeline can dash once in one of eight directions for extra speed, distance, or to squeeze through narrow gaps.² The dash is regained by touching the ground or collecting a green crystal, and Madeline’s hair changes color — from red to blue — to signal when the dash is spent.² She can also latch onto walls and climb up them, an action limited by a stamina meter that refills only on the ground.² The publisher describes the controls as simple and accessible — jump, air-dash, and climb — but layered with expressive depth, framing the design around the idea that every death is a lesson.⁶

The base game comprises seven story chapters, including such named stages as Old Site, Celestial Resort, and The Summit, the last of which remixes earlier chapters into shorter segments.¹ Each chapter introduces its own mechanics: Old Site features “dream blocks,” jelly-like blocks Madeline can dash through to cover extra distance, while Celestial Resort is built around dust bunnies that kill on contact and demand precise timing.¹ Death is frequent but forgiving: Madeline respawns almost instantly at the start of each short screen, a design intended to keep players climbing.¹ ⁶ The Switch version is described as containing more than 700 screens of platforming.⁶ Reviewers note that when the player dies, it is almost always immediately obvious what went wrong, whether a mistimed input or a dash used in the wrong place.²

Each chapter hides optional collectibles. There are 175 strawberries scattered across the game, generally off the main path and awarded only when the player returns to safety in a single attempt; they are largely cosmetic, slightly altering the ending image.² Hidden cassette tapes each come with a rhythm-platforming challenge and unlock harder remixed “B-Side” levels with reworked stage music, and blue crystal hearts — one per stage outside the prologue — are required to progress.² The B-Side levels are harder still, some demanding speedrunner-level movement technique, and award red crystal hearts on completion.² An assist mode lets players customize the difficulty, slowing the game or granting additional dashes for those who find the standard challenge too steep.⁵

The game’s difficulty and accessibility together drew commentary from players: one reviewer who described themselves as a complete beginner finished the base game in 19 hours and 45 minutes against an average of around eight hours, dying 1,384 times on Celestial Resort alone and collecting only 18 of the 175 strawberries.¹

Story and themes

The narrative follows Madeline, a depressed and anxious young woman who sets out to climb Celeste Mountain to challenge herself and find clarity.¹ ⁵ On her ascent she meets Granny, an old woman who has lived at the mountain’s base for decades and warns her that the journey is dangerous, and Theo, a photographer from Seattle who climbs to take pictures for his “InstaPix” and offers Madeline camaraderie and encouragement.² The mountain’s powers conjure “Badeline,” a dark mirror image of Madeline rendered in purple against her orange-and-blue scheme, who manifests her anxiety, depression, and insecurities and tries — sometimes forcefully — to dissuade her from climbing.¹ ² In the chapter “Reflection,” Badeline throws Madeline down the mountain, and her boss fight in that chapter is among the game’s most cited dramatic peaks.¹

The mountain serves as an allegory for personal struggle, and the game is, at its core, about self-acceptance, dramatized through the way Madeline and Badeline first reject and ultimately reconcile with each other.¹ ⁵ Thorson has stated that Madeline is canonically transgender, a reading with personal connections to the developer.¹ IMDb summarizes the story as a depressed young woman scaling a supernatural mountain to salvage her self-respect, confronted by a doppelganger manifesting her doubts and fears.⁵

Reception

Celeste was widely praised on release, with some critics calling it one of the greatest games of all time.² Lena Raine’s score, led by live piano and synth, was singled out and earned an IGF “Excellence in Audio” finalist nomination, the soundtrack running over two hours.¹ ⁶ The game was nominated for five BAFTA Awards, winning three of them, alongside eleven nominations in total.⁵ On Steam it holds an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating across more than 59,000 reviews, with 97 percent positive overall and 96 percent positive among recent reviews.⁴ On IMDb it carries an 8.6 out of 10 rating from some 2,100 votes.⁵

The game has frequently been compared to Super Meat Boy for its difficulty and short, checkpoint-dense levels, comparisons that helped popularize the informal “precision platformer” label adopted as one of its defining Steam tags.² ⁴ Players and reviewers have noted that, despite its punishing surface, the fast respawns and short screens keep frustration in check while the soundtrack and self-discovery narrative sustain emotional engagement.¹ ⁵ The pixel art was the work of an art team led by Pedro “Saint11” Medeiros, whose style later appeared in other indie titles.⁸

Influences and legacy

As a platformer, Celeste drew on Maddy Thorson’s earlier game as well as , and its near-perfect execution requirements were likened to the difficulty of SNES platformers.¹¹ The game’s score deliberately harks back to the platformers made for Nintendo systems during the 1980s and 1990s, with Lena Raine retaining the chiptune sound at the music’s melodic core—particularly for Madeline’s theme—and embellishing it with synths and a mix of sampled and live instruments.¹³ The setting’s name arose when Noel Berry searched for British Columbian mountains and the team chose Mount Celeste because they liked its name, despite knowing little about the mountain at the time.¹² The story itself grew out of personal experiences; when development began the game had little narrative beyond a young woman struggling to climb a mountain, and dialogue written by Thorson to incorporate gameplay mechanics expanded organically until the story became a central element.⁹ Badeline, introduced as the “Part of You” in the second chapter, began as a gameplay mechanic—a ghostly figure chasing the player through a tower—before growing into one of the game’s most important aspects and driving the entire narrative.⁹

Celeste has in turn been credited with shaping later games, setting a bar for that tackle difficult themes within carefully designed systems.¹¹ Its approach to accessibility, embodied in its assist mode and its self-imposed difficulty through optional strawberries, has been described as influencing numerous other games and as redefining what accessibility in gaming can look like.¹⁰ Its narrative achievements have been positioned alongside later indie titles such as the 2022 horror game Signalis, which has been cited as part of an indie scene increasingly telling meaningful stories alongside masterful gameplay.¹¹ Commentators have suggested that the game gave rise to an emerging “Celeste-like” descriptor for movement-focused platformers, and players have identified titles such as Germinal as heavily inspired by it.¹⁰ ¹⁴

Origins

Gameplay

Story and themes

Reception

Influences and legacy

Sources