Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood when I played this but I didn't really experience the platformer masterpiece that everyone else seems to have played. I just kinda played through the whole game in one night in like 4-5 hours and wasn't really left with anything to chew on. I know there's lots of side/extra content other than the main story but I just didn't feel compelled to check it out. It's not like I had a bad experience or anything, in fact, I think there's very little that the game does wrong, so hopefully I can explain and better understand why my experience with this game didn't live up to the incredibly high standards this game is held up to.
For the story, while it's a relatively minor aspect of the game I think it's the aspect of the game where I can most easily understand why I didn't get anything out of it. It's what I'd call a functional story, while I didn't find it compelling there's not much wrong with it. I think the story suffers from a lack of pointed metaphors to convey any specific points, as the development and messages of the story felt kinda generic. It's the kind of story that requires the audience to imprint their own personal experiences onto it to extract any value or meaning from it. There's the common trans experience interpretation of the story which I think makes a lot of sense but it's not something I got from the story during my playthrough, and I feel this is due to the story conveying its messaging in a way that is too open to interpretation. I understand and am happy for the people that got a lot of value from the story, but as someone who hasn't had any similar life experiences the game just didn't offer anything to me story-wise. A better written story simply wouldn't require some specific life experience from the audience as a prerequisite to enjoying and relating to it.
As for the mechanics and gameplay, I think lots of the things that people praise this game for are things that I kind of just expect as a baseline level for platformers. I agree that the controls and movement have a nice flow and feel "tight", but having these features doesn't make Celeste feel outstanding to me; if Celeste (or any other platformer) lacked that flow, it wouldn't go from outstanding to average, it would go from average to bad. It's not like the game does the bare minimum to be good, but I never felt that any individual mechanic or feature particularly excelled or overachieved in a way that made it stand out from other platformers.
For me, thinking about why I love Mario 64 helps me to understand why I didn't like Celeste as much. Mario 64 is made fun through Mario's wide suite of movement options combined with more open-ended levels that you can roam through freely. As the game progressively offers more challenging stages and sections, the player keeps up and can even exceed the game's pace by mastering Mario's movement. This principle applies not only to the game as a whole, but to individual stages themselves. As you collect more and more stars in an individual level you understand the flow of the level better and often find yourself naturally utilizing more creative movement options to get through repeated sections of stages quicker and quicker. This progression and mastery of stages comes naturally to players just due to the inherent desire to speed past parts of stages you've seen already, and pushes the player to improve at the game without the game explicitly forcing you to. Lessons learned in one stage can be applied to other stages, which created a great sense of mastery and fun as I zoomed through later levels utilizing long jumps and jump dives to quickly maneuver Mario around. It's this sense of mastery that I feel is somewhat lacking in Celeste due to fun movement being level-centric rather than character-centric. Madeline's movement is intentionally simple and limited; complexity is injected in the game via level design as opposed to movement options. While there certainly are lessons to be learned and mastered in Celeste, most of the time whenever you beat a level the only thing I felt I mastered was the specific set of inputs and movements I needed to do to beat that level, and moving on to a new level just meant learning a new set of inputs. The game increases challenge throughout the game by either requiring more precise inputs, faster inputs, or longer chains of inputs, and while pulling these off can occasionally be fun, mastering individual levels was just not very compelling to me. I often felt that lessons I learned from beating one level often didn't help me beat another level. When playing the game, I was never really mastering Madeline's movement, I was only mastering individual levels. I don't think this is an inherently bad thing and I understand why people love Celeste's design philosophy, but for my personal tastes it makes the game feel too linear and one-dimensional.
Celeste is one of those games where I agree with pretty much all of the individual points of praise it receives, but I just can't deny that the experience I had with the game felt painfully average. I just didn't really get anything out of this game, and it's somewhat hard for me to explain why that's the case when the game does so many things right. The game just didn't click with me I guess.
Probably going to check out the dev's new game whenever that comes out though, it seems more like my thing than Celeste.
For the story, while it's a relatively minor aspect of the game I think it's the aspect of the game where I can most easily understand why I didn't get anything out of it. It's what I'd call a functional story, while I didn't find it compelling there's not much wrong with it. I think the story suffers from a lack of pointed metaphors to convey any specific points, as the development and messages of the story felt kinda generic. It's the kind of story that requires the audience to imprint their own personal experiences onto it to extract any value or meaning from it. There's the common trans experience interpretation of the story which I think makes a lot of sense but it's not something I got from the story during my playthrough, and I feel this is due to the story conveying its messaging in a way that is too open to interpretation. I understand and am happy for the people that got a lot of value from the story, but as someone who hasn't had any similar life experiences the game just didn't offer anything to me story-wise. A better written story simply wouldn't require some specific life experience from the audience as a prerequisite to enjoying and relating to it.
As for the mechanics and gameplay, I think lots of the things that people praise this game for are things that I kind of just expect as a baseline level for platformers. I agree that the controls and movement have a nice flow and feel "tight", but having these features doesn't make Celeste feel outstanding to me; if Celeste (or any other platformer) lacked that flow, it wouldn't go from outstanding to average, it would go from average to bad. It's not like the game does the bare minimum to be good, but I never felt that any individual mechanic or feature particularly excelled or overachieved in a way that made it stand out from other platformers.
For me, thinking about why I love Mario 64 helps me to understand why I didn't like Celeste as much. Mario 64 is made fun through Mario's wide suite of movement options combined with more open-ended levels that you can roam through freely. As the game progressively offers more challenging stages and sections, the player keeps up and can even exceed the game's pace by mastering Mario's movement. This principle applies not only to the game as a whole, but to individual stages themselves. As you collect more and more stars in an individual level you understand the flow of the level better and often find yourself naturally utilizing more creative movement options to get through repeated sections of stages quicker and quicker. This progression and mastery of stages comes naturally to players just due to the inherent desire to speed past parts of stages you've seen already, and pushes the player to improve at the game without the game explicitly forcing you to. Lessons learned in one stage can be applied to other stages, which created a great sense of mastery and fun as I zoomed through later levels utilizing long jumps and jump dives to quickly maneuver Mario around. It's this sense of mastery that I feel is somewhat lacking in Celeste due to fun movement being level-centric rather than character-centric. Madeline's movement is intentionally simple and limited; complexity is injected in the game via level design as opposed to movement options. While there certainly are lessons to be learned and mastered in Celeste, most of the time whenever you beat a level the only thing I felt I mastered was the specific set of inputs and movements I needed to do to beat that level, and moving on to a new level just meant learning a new set of inputs. The game increases challenge throughout the game by either requiring more precise inputs, faster inputs, or longer chains of inputs, and while pulling these off can occasionally be fun, mastering individual levels was just not very compelling to me. I often felt that lessons I learned from beating one level often didn't help me beat another level. When playing the game, I was never really mastering Madeline's movement, I was only mastering individual levels. I don't think this is an inherently bad thing and I understand why people love Celeste's design philosophy, but for my personal tastes it makes the game feel too linear and one-dimensional.
Celeste is one of those games where I agree with pretty much all of the individual points of praise it receives, but I just can't deny that the experience I had with the game felt painfully average. I just didn't really get anything out of this game, and it's somewhat hard for me to explain why that's the case when the game does so many things right. The game just didn't click with me I guess.
Probably going to check out the dev's new game whenever that comes out though, it seems more like my thing than Celeste.