How Celeste Tells One Of The Best Video Game Stories Of All Time

By Scott Tailford / March 21, 2018

From Super Metroid to Metal Gear, Shadow of the Colossus to The Last of Us, gaming has spun all sorts of yarns across its relatively young lifetime. Though, for as loveable as these characters and motivations are - are these stories fundamentally told in a way that benefits gaming as a medium?

Rare is the game that actually uses the very fact we're controlling the action on screen to tell a meaningful story. You can argue that yes, being the person that kills The Boss in Snake Eater or downs the Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus drew you into the moment, but fundamentally, was through a video game the only way this scene could unfurl, and could its impact also be done on film, or on the page?

- Spoilers for Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons follow -

What I'm getting at, is think of something like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Across that game you become accustomed to controlling two protagonists at once, with one analogue stick and a trigger each. It's a bit of a learning process, but when one of the brothers dies, you literally feel the loss in gameplay, because now you're only playing with half the pad.

Cut to the end of the game, and when the little brother must remember the lessons he's been taught by his older sibling, you actually reuse the now-dormant part of the controller, rounding him off as a character and fundamentally moving him through the world in a more accomplished way.

It's genius, and indicative of a style of storytelling that's SO rare in the medium.

This brings me onto Celeste, as I've not been so absolutely emotionally devastated by a game in quite some time. Not in a bad way, either. More a "Yup, I'm never going to experience that for the first time ever again" kinda way.

Now obviously I'd recommend playing Celeste for yourself, but let's go full spoilers if you're sticking around, because what two-man dev team Matt Thorson and Noel Berry have accomplished, makes for an utterly exquisite experience.

Celeste is an exploration of doubt, anxiety and failure - emotions and sensations we all feel, and some are completely dominated by. Centred on the physical act of character Madeline climbing the titular mountain, she comes across a few characters along the way that mostly serve to be commenters on her struggle.

There's the chirpy self-confident Theo, the constantly worrying Mr. Oshiro and the mocking, "Oh just give up, why even bother"-style candour from someone literally called Granny.

Together they texture this gorgeous pixel adventure and factor into some supremely tough platforming. Celeste is a hard game, but one you can tell has been play-tested and refined until its difficulty curve is JUST right. Jumps, wall-kicks and boosts are all you have, but they get put to use across a series of levels that vary things up with puzzles and environmental hazards.

There's more to Celeste than the mountain's difficulty being a manifestation of any one individual's life challenges, but getting comfortable with being knocked back and incrementally progressing by using Madeline's own strengths is already tapping into why the game has such a positive takeaway message.

Back to the story itself, and before long you meet a dark, mirror version of Madeline. No-named and only being referred towards Madeline as "part of you", it's clear Madeline has dealt with - and been overpowered by - this being's effect on her psyche before.

Quickly we understand that this darker avatar is the on-screen manifestation of Madeline's worries; her doubts and fears: She's the voice we all have in our head whenever we want to push for something greater in real life. She's the almost societally reinforced notion that you should stick to your post; stick with what's reliable; don't go out of your comfort zone, because what if something goes wrong?

The game mostly sets up this darker self as a villain, and gaming in general would dictate some sort of "final boss" scenario with Madeline vanquishing her doubts and emerging victorious would follow.

But she doesn't. Or rather... in some of the most affecting and emotionally powerful scenes I've seen, she starts to have a conversation with her worst self. She learns to rationalise those often overriding negativities with reason, with determination, with a will to carry on and prove herself no matter what.

In-game, this initially comes from many raw interactions and chase sequences as Madeline's shadow self doesn't WANT to "open up"; she doesn't want to be understood because after all, she represents that runaway negativity we can often be paralysed by. To understand this is to vanquish and hone it, and therein lies Celeste's greatest achievement.

Eventually the pair reach something of an agreement on how it's okay to feel scared and shoot for the stars, and you start working together to make bigger jumps; to reach that little bit higher; to save you from falling at the last minute; to climb the mountain as one.

The following rush of fast-paced levels, the reality of working with this "antagonist" you've feared and ran away from so many times - the fact that developers Thorson and Berry save some of the most intense visual flourishes and controller rumbles for the final few steps. It really comes together in a way that was so emotionally overwhelming, I just had to sit with a sensation of pure happiness, reward and accomplishment, for quite some time.

Celeste provides a window into how those who deal with depression, anxiety, general worry or any remote sense of dread in everyday life can learn to visualise their more "out of control" elements, bringing them back under control and finding the positives inside mentalities otherwise routed in worry and a paralysing feeling of over-consideration.

Everybody feels trepidation, anxiety, stress - but they're human thoughts, impulses and emotions that can be channelled for good. The key, as Celeste says and I agree, is moderation.

As modern technology and newer generations continue to dissect and truly understand every last part of our insanely complex chemical makeup, when it comes to mental health, it is so refreshing to see a video game do something that means all who play, will come away with a greater understanding of what it means for each of us to tackle our own individual mountains.