Celeste

About

Celeste is an indie platforming video game designed and published by Matt Makes Games released in January of 2018 on all major gaming platforms.

History

A prototype for Celeste was created by Noel Barry and Maddie Thorson in 2016^[1] in four days. The prototyped was designed for precision gameplay and speed runs. In the course of two years, the full game was developed by Thorson and Barry, written by Thorson, with artwork by Amora B. and Pedro Medeiros, and music by Lena Raine. A trailer for the game was posted on February 28th, 2017 (shown below). It was published on January 25th, 2018 for all major video game platforms, including all the major consoles, Windows, Mac, and Linux.

In the game, the player plays as Madeleine, a climber attempting to climb the titular mountain. Along the way, she meets several other characters on the mountain. With limited mechanics--a jump, a dash, and a grab/climb button--Madeleine works through dozens of levels in an attempt to reach the top.

Reception

The game was very critically well received. The Nintendo Switch release has a score of 94/100 on Metacritic^[2] with critics praising the game's level design, gameplay, style, and emotional depth. IGN gave the game a perfect score in its video review of the game (shown below, left). In his generally sarcastic style, VideoGameDunkey also gave the game high praise in his review, which gained over 1.9 million views.

Online Presence

The game's development was documented in a Tumblr page maintained by the creators.^[3] The game has been highly praised in several Reddit threads, particularly in Switch-based communities. A thread posted to /r/NintendoSwitch^[4] on the day of release called it a perfect game for the Switch's portable mode. Another posted the 27th to the same subreddit highly praised the game and gained over 630 upvotes.^[6] A subreddit^[5] was also created for the game, though it has only 27 subscribers as of January 29th, 2018.

Search Interest

External References