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Celeste (PS4) Status: Finished playing I started playing this game on Wednesday 29 July, 2020 // I stopped playing this game on: Sunday 2 August, 2020
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
August 2, 2020 08:27:10 PM
All done now! In all it looks like I spent 9 1/2 hours with the game, which is pretty nice. I'm ready to move on to the next thing. Yes, the end got really challenging at times and I'll admit that I turned off (on?) a bunch more things to make it easier. I wonder if there was any outcry/whining about the difficulty system? Now that I think about it, I could easily go and collect all the berries and hidden things and so on (e.g. to get all the trophies), but - what's the point really? From the trophy percentages - it looks like not a lot of people have bothered. I still wonder if there was any whining about "making things too easy" and that sort of misplaced complaining....
August 1, 2020 09:49:20 PM
Ok, I'm done with 6 levels and it looks like I only have one left. The last one I did was quite annoying. There were fun and interesting parts, for sure - but I really felt like it overstayed its welcome. My son was watching as I played and said as much. He wasn't impressed. During lunch I was asked what was challenging about the game and I had to think about it, but here's my answer: Celeste's main source of challenge comes from two things: (a) Hand-eye coordination and reflexes (executing jumps, grabs, dashes, etc. at the right moment. and (b) Puzzle solving. For the latter most of the areas require that you figure out how to traverse them - and some are quite clever. Do a dash in this direction, grab that ledge and wait for X, and then...and so on. I enjoy the screens with these elements more than (a) above. Though, to be fair most of the screens challenge me on both.
July 31, 2020 12:58:14 PM
I bumped this up my to-play list at my son's insistence. So far I know the game is quite challenging for me. Like really challenging. I'll never finish it without assistance and I'll never get all the strawberries and other nonsense that's hidden around the game. Or, I could say that I don't want to spend the time necessary to practice enough to get there? So far, the game experience has been unremarkable - I'm not sure I'm not appreciating some subtleties/nuances in the gameplay and controls. It seems like a nicely polished indie platforming game. Sure. So, I made my way into the middle of the 2nd level when my son wandered in and asked if I'd been using the assist system (I had not). I was then struggling in a certain area - lots of death and repeats - so he suggested turning it on and lowering the speed of the game to 80%. Wow! I had no idea how much this would impact my experience. I was still dying a lot and being challenged - but, I was also able to overcome things and feel like I could do this. What's even weird is that, because I've left it on, I now don't even notice anything. If you told me that it had switched back to 100% (normal) speed without me noticing, I would be really surprised. So, the game got easier in a distinct way that was noticeable but not obviously noticeable. This is SO clever! I don't think it would work with all games - but I wonder about its use as an accessibility feature more widely, and what the challenges are to implement. On the one hand I think "oh, this must be super easy" but then I think "oh, wait a minute, this might be super hard because...". I wonder what the actual truth of the matter is? Anyways, I've since cleared the library and I'm past the 1st checkpoint of the next level. I'm not sure I'll want to finish the game, so I'll need to talk with my son a bit more about why he wanted me to play the game. Have I experienced what he wanted me to get out of the game yet?

Celeste (PS4)