Happy Second Birthday Celeste! I’m late again, I know. But thanks to the Farewell update released last September, Celeste is imprinted on my 2019 as much as it was the year before. Because Farewell is
Now, this is a small spoiler, but you have to hold as Madeline falls, to speed her descent enough to just () catch the falling spring block as it plummets away from you.
Holding down stretches Madeline, squashing and squeezing her as she accelerates – way too quick for comfort – towards a tiny, moving chunk of moon rock. This is right at the beginning of Farewell, Celeste’s DLC finale. And it’s : Panicky and stylish and more genuinely thrilling through the fingers than some whole games manage with their-canned, smoke-and-mirror bluster.
And even though I reckon I’m pretty fluent in Celeste – which I not only beat, but beat-beat-beat (those C-Sides!) – it took me ages to work out. Ages to consider pimping-up the dropping-down, that core part of a platformer’s rise and fall; its inhale-exhale. And this was before the new stuff: The jellyfish parachutes and the blowfish and That Bird. Here was a problem of springs and spikes, Celeste’s bread-and-butter, and a long chasm I couldn’t seem to make it across, teasing out a new trick from a palette of movement
But Farewell is just getting started.
What unfolds thereafter is a mini-epic, practically a game unto itself that just keeps on extending, surprising, delighting, exhausting. Madeline is trying to find a friend, and this takes place on the Moon. As with Celeste Mountain, it’s a journey inwards as well as onwards. But this is more of a Majora’s moon, with its own hazy strangeness. With pinks and cyan, and distant star fields of starfish. With hi-hats and synth, then cello and violin. With platforms that bob like buoys and tight coral mazes that shine iridescent, like a sea shell’s inside. And, later on,
A little way in there’s a drop – literal, musical, environmental – that I wish everyone could experience, an uprush ascent from darkness and synth into gleaming, blue-bloom luminescence. With tiny, glowing amoeba-creatures swimming through the air. Then, this chorus of strings like morning has broken.