By Elle and Logan

Introduction (Elle): 

Celeste offers a unique gameplay experience in relation to other platformer games, providing features such as Invincibility Mode, which makes gameplay possible even for me as a person with limited video gaming experience.  In this blog post, we write about Celeste’s expansion of play possibilities and incorporation of mental health narratives. 

Modes of Play (Logan):

Despite being a tough as nails platformer with unrelenting obstacles that threaten you at every turn, Celeste stands out as a game that embraces players of all skill levels. The fundamental controls of the game come down to a joystick or directional pad for movement through the space, a jump, a grab, and a dash. Many modern platformers tend to overwhelm new players with mechanics and abilities that require precision and a deep level of game knowledge to get a grasp on. Celeste is content to keep the controls simple and let the game mechanics speak for themselves. The game launched with seven levels and two more were added later on, and each one has a unique mechanic that alters the standard gameplay in some form. None of these significantly change the players’ moveset or require additional buttons, they just recontextualize and build upon what has already been established. The approach that the Celeste developers took to making a platformer creates a fascinating dichotomy. They have created a brutally challenging game that is effectively impossible to truly complete, that is also very approachable and understandable to players of all levels of ability. It’s easy to understand, but difficult to master. This is especially evident in Celeste’s prominent speed running community in which pixel-perfect movement and hundreds of frame-perfect inputs are required to get a top-level time. The fundamental gameplay and mechanics of Celeste were crafted in a way that the game can be enjoyed by anyone. 

As if that wasn’t enough, Celeste offers a glut of assist options right off the bat through its extensive “assist mode.” There are five options within this umbrella, some of which have multiple options within them, and some of which can be simply toggled on or off: game speed, infinite stamina, air dashes, dash assist and invincibility. Game speed is fairly self-explanatory. You can slow down everything in the game to 50% speed by intervals of 10%. This allows the player to adjust the level of timing and precision necessary on some of the obstacles. Infinite stamina allows the player to cling to walls for as long as they want, which creates far more safe spots to rest and take a breath between difficult obstacles. Normally, the player gets to use their dash one time before they touch the ground again or refill their stamina some other way. The “air dashes” option lets the player dash twice in midair or an infinite amount of times if they so choose. Dash assist stops the game any time the player dashes and allows them to select an arrow that’s pointing the direction they want to go. This is especially useful for getting used to the ability and its cardinal limitations. Lastly, toggling invincibility allows the player to touch obstacles and keep going. What’s fantastic about the assist mode in Celeste is the variety of options that appeal to different potential needs of the player base. Some of them, such as game speed, invincibility, and air dashes, simply make the game easier. For people who aren’t as experienced in platforming or simply don’t have the privilege of sinking hours of effort into every play session, this lets them set their own level of challenge. Others, such as dash assist and infinite stamina, give players of differing abilities options to enjoy a game that otherwise may present barriers that the developers hadn’t considered. Putting accessibility in the hands of the players allows for individuals to choose what works best for them and prevents the developers from having to attempt a “one size fits all” approach that will inevitably leave people behind. All of this is already great, but Celeste takes things a step further. Contemporary platformers often employ similar, albeit less robust, assist modes. If you die too many times, the game asks you if you’d like to skip the level or gives you a power-up that makes you invincible, etc. However, these games usually punish you for taking advantage of these options. In many games I’ve played, using the options that the game provides can permanently lock you out of true completion, even if you go back and beat the level “legitimately.” I understand the desire to preserve rewards for “pure” completion of one’s game, but offering disadvantaged players a way to beat your game only to punish them for taking it is just scummy, not to mention bad game design. Celeste allows the player to use any accessibility options they want and still considers a win legitimate. You can even skip through every single level and watch the final cutscene, and the game doesn’t punish you or hold it against you in any way. Does this diminish the value of what a “win” truly means? Maybe. But ultimately, players who want to truly challenge themselves still have the ability to do so, and players who otherwise wouldn’t be able to now can as well. If anything, that makes the idea of “winning” even more valuable. A win in Celeste is not on the level designer’s terms, it’s on the players’ terms. I believe that’s an incredibly powerful subversion. 

Mental Health Narratives (Elle): 

I’m feeling Sam Quirke’s writing about his experience playing Celeste as highlighting a kind of space in which players can be responsive to what the game offers them in relation to mental health while feeding those strategies back into the context of the game.  Quirke writes that “If I find myself hurling at a difficult section relentlessly, I remember the feather [breathing strategy offered by the game] and stop to take a breath.”  I would argue that this represents a kind of accessibility, although it does not figure as one of the official Assist Mode features discussed above by Logan. 

Players can not only use the feather breathing strategy within the boundaries of the game and the gameplay, but also—in a fantasmic way—allow that tactic for navigating anxiety and panic to transcend the edges of the space, potentially breaking the magic circle (Chess 74-75) and letting a gameplay feature—keeping the feather inside the box on the screen—move beyond its boundaries to affect a player’s real, physical, life. 

Conclusion (Logan):

Celeste doesn’t treat accessibility as an inconvenient checkbox to tick off during the development process, or a blurb on the back of the box. Accessibility is a gameplay mechanic that is inherent to the game’s design and the player’s experience. It is up to you to create and beat the obstacles set up for you. All the developers do is provide you with the means and tools to do so. It’s one thing to create a game that everyone wants to play. But the developers of Celeste went a step further and made a game that anyone can play. 

Bibliography: 

Chess, Shira.  “Play to Protest.”  In Play Like a Feminist, 74-75.  Cambridge, Massachusetts:  The MIT Press, 2020. 

Quirke, Sam. “The Mountains We Make: Celeste and Mental Health.” TrueAchievements, 24 Feb 2018. https://www.trueachievements.com/n31419/the-mountains-we-make-celeste-and-mental-health

Further Reading:

Brown, Mark & Anderson, Sky LaRell.  “Designing for Disability: Evaluating the State of Accessibility Design in Video Games.”  In Games and Culture 16, no. 6 (2021):  702-718. 

Dumont, Alexandra & Bonenfant, Maude.  “Thinking Inclusiveness, Diversity, and Cultural Equity Based on Game Mechanics and Accessibility Features in Popular Video Games.”  In The Palgrave Handbook of Disability and Communication, 221-242.  Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 

Klepek, Patrick.  “The Small But Important Change ‘Celeste’ Made to Its Celebrated Assist Mode.”  Vice, September 16, 2019.  https://www.vice.com/en/article/43kadm/celeste-assist-mode-change-and-accessibility. 

Signor, Jeremy. “How the Celeste Speedrunning Community Became Queer as Hell.” Kotaku, 30 Nov. 2021, kotaku.com/how-the-celeste-speedrunning-community-became-queer-as-1848120383. 

Simon, Annika. The Mountains We Make: Eine medienästhetische Analyse psychischer Störungen in CELESTE. In: transcript; Görgen, Arno; Simond, Stefan Heinrich: Krankheit in Digitalen Spielen. Interdisziplinäre Betrachtungen. Bielefeld: transcript 2020, 189-210.* 

By Elle and Logan

Introduction: Logan

What does it mean to be queer? I believe it’s fair to say that queerness as a concept has metamorphosized over the last century, and is, for all intents and purposes, unrecognizable now when compared to its premodern implications. What used to be a derogatory term for homosexuality has been reclaimed as a personal sense of self-expression, a category of ideas and ideologies, a term for a contemporary wave of explorative academia, and, most integral to this current exploration, a form of confident divergence from the establishment. This divergence is present all around us in a variety of forms like books and films, but I’m a firm believer that contemporary ideology always pairs especially well with contemporary ways of delivering it. That’s why I adore the discussion of queerness in video games so much. The level of interactivity and passion involved in every step of the video game perfectly lends itself to the ability to experiment and challenge preconceived notions. A phenomenal example of everything I have brought up, from queerness as self-expression and confident defiance to video games taking full advantage of their unique medium, is the 2019 indie hit Celeste. 

Queer Resistance to Normative Play: Elle

One significant feature of Celeste that players might notice early on is that although the game records the number of deaths a player accumulates in the course of playing a level, the player is not penalized whatsoever for the number of times their character dies.  Any meaning or significance that a player might attach to death in the context of Celeste is challenged by the fact that players have the option to turn on Invincibility Mode, one of the Assist Mode features.  Players might, of course, also borrow meanings from their experiences with other games where they are penalized for accumulating, in some cases, a specific number of deaths. 

This can be read, queerly, as a resistance to a possibly normative way of moving through a platformer game that might prominently feature navigation along a direct, predetermined pathway.  The player of Celeste is empowered to choose how they wish to move through the spaces that their character encounters in the game.  Bonnie Ruberg writes that “Queerness challenges dominant beliefs about pleasure and power” (Ruberg 7).  I am imagining that a player might experience pleasure at not dying and I remain curious about where this pleasure is coming from.  Is it from their experience playing other platformer games where death might have greater significance within the gameplay than it does in Celeste? Where might the value of not dying come from? 

If playing can be a queer practice, or playing queerly can be a practice, and if “[Both] Queerness and video games… make space within structures of power for resistance through play,” then how might this resistance take place, be enacted?  I want to suggest one possibility, drawing on my experience with disability studies.  Rosemarie Garland Thomson writes that “Stairs… create a functional ‘impairment’ for wheelchair users that ramps do not” (Garland Thomson 7).  In a similar way, navigating the spaces with which players are presented in Celeste using Invincibility Mode might be read as a kind of resistance against a “normate” way of playing that privileges a player’s ability to navigate Celeste’s spaces as a signifier of how good the player is at Celeste, or at platformer games, or at video games more generally.  As my own personal experience with video gaming includes deep knowledge of a few specific 90s platformers, I would not derive pleasure from playing Celeste without Invincibility Mode on.  However, I want to suggest that resisting the value of character death, as Celeste offers it to players, as a signifier of anything offers a queer, anti-ableist mode of gaming that might be used as a model for making, or for playing, other games. 

Subverting Game Death as Punishment: Logan

As mentioned above, Celeste is a game that embraces what its contemporaries in the platforming genre generally see as acts worth punishing. In an overwhelming majority of mainstream platformers, if you fail too many times, you are punished and have progress taken away from you. Those who are already struggling are punished further, while those who manage to succeed, whether due to prior experience or natural ability, are rewarded further. Based on this description, it should come as no surprise that most conventions of the modern platformer have strong roots in capitalism. Platformers originated in arcades in which companies were financially incentivized to make games cryptic, challenging, and generally inaccessible. After all, you’re more likely to put quarters into a machine when you can’t clear it on your first try. However, mainline platformer series have largely remained unchanged in this way. When you lose all of your lives, you are punished. Your inability to play the game the way its designers intended is met with progress that you HAVE made being taken away from you. This is where Celeste comes in.  

The idea of death as punishment is subverted in several ways. First off, all progress is guaranteed. Unless you go out of your way to reset your progress, clearing a screen once means you’ve cleared it for good. Some of these screens are longer and/or more difficult than others, but beating one means your victory is yours to keep. This means that a player who struggles to overcome the games’ tougher challenges is rewarded every time they manage to do, and success doesn’t lead to pressure to succeed more under threat of their progress being undone. Additionally, the number of times a player dies in each level is tallied and displayed right next to their strawberries, the games’ main collectible. Celeste treats its collectibles and the players’ deaths as equal achievements: both things that deserve recognition from onlookers. This small change to the standard gameplay loop completely recontextualizes the act of platforming within its titular genre as something that is unequivocally deserving of praise, regardless of factors such as death count, time taken, and skill level. Not only does this increase accessibility for the genre, but it flips the traditional “do what we want how we want you to, or you’ve failed” narrative that subconsciously runs through the platformer genre on its head. Going by Ruberg’s classification of queerness in video games, I contend that this easily fits the bill. After all, what could be more antithetical to hegemony than rewarding failure and living experiences at one’s own pace without regard to experience or level of ability? 

Conclusion: Elle

Celeste is a queer game that troubles normative platformer expectations and calls into question the role of deaths, collectibles, and the relationship of gaming to capitalism.  Through these practices, Celeste offers spaces for players to engage with gaming in ways that disrupt normate ideologies of gaming.

Bibliography:

Garland Thomson, Rosemarie.  “Disability, Identity, and Representation:  An Introduction.”  In Extraordinary Bodies:  Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, 5- 18.  New York:  Columbia University Press, 1997. 

Ruberg, Bonnie.  Introduction to Video Games Have Always Been Queer.  New York:  New York University Press, 2019.