Celeste ⛰️🍓

🎵 The song for this post is Sabor a Mi, performed by Eydie Gorme and Los Panchos. 🎵

My buddy Noah started blogging about his favorite books, and the joy is contagious. My art crits this year have been pieces I recently finished consuming, not historical favorites. I got the urge to finally write that love letter to Celeste. I've written a paragraph or two about it before, but 6 years in, this game still sticks with me, and when I see friends struggling, I want to grab them by the shoulders and be like "OMG PLAY CELESTE." Sometimes my friend group succeeds in making the rest of us consume something we're obsessed with so we can nerd out about it together: I made people play Disco Elysium when I was losing my mind over it this summer, and last Fall, Saurya persuaded me and a few others to watch all of Attack on Titan. But Celeste has been a hard one to make others play. Not for nothing, the game is very hard.

In most of my art crits, I hide spoilers in expandable tags. This one, like my Substance post, I'm just going to write freely. I really hope you do a playthrough first, and if it's too hard, use Assist Mode shamelessly. I also think a normal playthrough of the game is 60% easier on a controller than a keyboard. Precision platformers aren't for everybody. But if you don't care, or you don't really play video games and are just here for the Pablo 🫀, or if you've already played it, read on!

Oshiro and boundaries

I'll start with a narrative I never see writing about: Oshiro, and what I think he does for the game.

Quick recap of Chapter 3: Madeline is climbing this mountain because she's struggling. She had a panic attack calling her mom in the previous chapter. She has plenty to work on. But as soon as she meets someone else with their own issues, Madeline turns away from her needs, acquires a few new obstacles, and makes it her project to help him. Theo, correctly, identifies this as a lost cause and makes for the exit. He tries to warn Madeline, but just like Oshiro, if she's gonna choose misery, he can't stop her from choosing it, since he can't save her either. Later, Badeline pops out from Maddy, gives Oshiro a ton of shit for being a delusional leech, reducing him to a pile of tears, and clears a way out for your escape. Oshiro gets pissed and chases you out, trying to harm you for the pain "you've" caused him.

While it only becomes clear later, this chapter lets you see that Badeline isn't simply "Madeline, who sucks," because her outburst is the only thing that gets them out of there. Badeline, while markedly making Madeline's life less pleasant, does something she couldn't, by being the Part of Her who stands up for herself and her needs. Madeline pushes down Badeline's judgement of Oshiro thinking this is just her being a jerk and lacking empathy, but it's Badeline who correctly judges Oshiro to be enough of a threat to finally put his ass in his place, albeit inelegantly.

There's another theme that I felt when I first played this—something about Oshiro being a polite, gentleness-coded man who leeches a woman's kindness, then gets violent as soon as she decides she's had enough cleaning up after him.

In the context of the piece: this game is oozing with empathy, understanding, and connection. It's about taking a very isolated person (Madeline) and teaching us, and her, to love that person. I feel like Oshiro is there to show you how things that look like positive examples of empathy may be flat-out toxic, and, counterintuitively, the best play is to cut and run. You will meet people who are stuck. They won't appear like an immediate threat. You may empathize with them deeply. But if you've got your own happiness to worry about, you should not take your eye off the ball and focus your efforts on them. Additionally, most situations require a person to get themselves out of their own pit, and the best you can do is support them from afar. After a few years in SF hippie communities, the idea that someone who speaks with all the right positive sentiments but is a total destructive mess, and a massive liability who hurts the people around them, strongly resonates.

This is in contrast to the character who later gets named Granny: she's coded as not empathetic, laughing at Madeline at inopportune times, and not biting when Madeline makes Oshiro-like pleas for pity. But when it comes down to it, she gives her the actionable (and ultimately, kind! respectful!) advice she needed, and didn't make it her project to "fix" Maddy. Maddy could take it or leave it.

Not from Celeste, a favorite example of this energy that I love comes from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Uncle Iroh, king of kings:

I love that Oshiro is in Celeste. At the end he even joins the strawberry party—Granny's line "this is the first time I've seen you leave that hotel of yours" suggests that in a way, Badeline's outburst did end up helping jolt him into action. You can show love to people who bring you down without letting them do that to you anymore.

I accidentally a trans narrative

I played Celeste thinking it was mostly about depression. And it's not not about depression. But some time after its release, "Matt" of "Matt Makes Games" became "Maddy" (and "Matt Makes Games" became "EXOK"), and she wrote a beautiful piece about how she didn't know she was writing a story of her grappling with her trans identity.

Whether it's depression, trans identity, or any other Part of You that never leaves which you initially wish to be rid of, this little moment from Chapter 1 resonates differently after you've played through it:

With my closest friends, I sometimes point out how strongly "trans-coded" I am. I keep my hair long. I love this game and feel like it spoke to me. For most of my adult life I've been clean shaven, and frequently did my nails. I got deep into little minutiae of obscure programming topics (many, many of the worlds most talented and obsessive hackers are trans). My predilection for theatre and aversion for athletics in High School. There are a few other examples that I don't feel like publishing here, but it seems many of my communities produce more transitions than is normal.

I don't think I'm trans? I don't feel like I'm "really" a woman. But I've never fit into "being a man" either. There's more ambiguity here than I think many would guess, since I don't talk about it much. I have severe and deep psychological hang-ups about clothes and shopping for them; I think I'd feel very differently about it if I were a woman. I'm straight-up jealous of their options vs. mine. I've always related more to most women characters than male ones, and found them more interesting.

I watched this YouTube summary/analysis of a manga and felt myself relate strongly with the main characters of the manga, and the manga's author when he peeks in to give commentary, and creator of the video (warning, it's an hour. save it to your phone, or watch it during a few lunches).

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I suspect this is more about my relationship to self and alienation than gender specifically. I think gender stuff is a bough of my existential angst, not the trunk. As it connects to Celeste: maybe there's a force that makes it comforting to me that I can't see, based on these threads. Mostly, it's an excuse to share Maddy Thorston's essay and this YouTube essay. But if this goes anywhere on my blog, I think it would be here.

The power of connection

I've said before that I've always felt like I don't fit. But I've been unpacking that a lot more these last few years.

Saurya has a wonderful saying: "Not all traumas are similarly-resolvable. Some are load-bearing traumas: if you resolved them, your whole world would collapse." Because I'm a busybody obsessed with psyches, I have models of these for many people in my life; some core storyline that seems to be a backbone to most of their struggles. Take "so-and-so": he claims to want to be a certain type of independent, capable, and respected man in a community of peers, but he made deliberate, major choices to shape his life and communities so he's back to being the pitiable runt of the litter. This reflects a childhood dynamic of being frequently compared to (and put down by) an overbearing, accomplished, uncharitable older sibling. A part of him wants the aspirational "king of his own life, respected as an equal in his community" but another part of him is more familiar, and therefore more comfortable, with the pains of that being just out of reach, and playing the role of the runt. I don't mention this as a character weakness, it's just that "being the runt" must be bearing an important load for his psyche for him to have chosen it, and that an alternative lifestyle is too scary and unfamiliar to give it up.

Another example: I had a friend in college who was bi, and we'd cry over our hopeless crushes most weekends. Then a weird thing happened: while he was still striking out with the boy he liked, the girl he liked was clearly flirting back, showing him the open door to dating. And he was looking at me with confused, existential angst? I was like "buddy, this is what you wanted! Go for it!" He didn't, and could never explain why. He spent the next year studying abroad in Germany, and came back being like "lol dude, I'm just gay." His time in Berlin gave him the space to build new structures to bear the load, so when he got back, he was able to host a new truth head-on. But until then, admitting he was gay, and imagining having to navigate his life without the possibility marrying a woman was scary enough that he felt safer denying his attractions. Bonus: if you think of a "load-bearing trauma" like a "load-bearing wall," Berlin is the perfect place for him to have Torn Down This Wall.

So I've recently been asking myself: is my alienation "load-bearing"? It's a source of great pain, but am I subconsciously holding onto it, nurturing it and keeping it alive, because without it I wouldn't know how to process the world, or my place in it? Said another way: something very central to me gets threatened if I allow myself to connect more freely, if I allow myself to "belong," but what is it? And as important, what would get liberated if I could release this?

In this post (probably my favorite from that year), I shared the poem Sisyphus and the Sudden Lightness by Stephen Dunn:

It was as if he had wings, and the wind behind him. Even uphill the rock seemed to move of its own accord.

Every road felt like a shortcut.

Sisyphus, of course, was worried; he'd come to depend on his burden, wasn't sure who he was without it.

His hands free, he peeled an orange. He stopped to pet a dog. Yet he kept going forward, afraid of the consequences of standing still.

He no longer felt inclined to smile.

It was then that Sisyphus realized the gods must be gone, that his wings were nothing more than a perception of their absence.

He dared to raise his fist to the sky. Nothing, gloriously, happened.

Then a different terror overtook him.

Without his boulder, Sisyphus is terrified. I believe we're all like Sisyphus, and most of us carry a boulder or two.

If I let myself connect with more people, or let myself be an enthusiastic member of communities instead of someone who feels like a critical outsider who snuck in, who would I even be?

I've written a lot about my journey after the Karen breakup, which taught me that "playing safe," isn't. It will not save you. I've spent the following few years really embracing the crevices of my personality and being. A result of this is that I've formed a single-digit number of connections that felt absolutely electric, unlike anything I'd felt before. Feeling like I had a copilot in life, when for most of my life I felt like an astronaut untethered to any ship, floating through empty space.

In Celeste, the dialogue at the beginning of Chapter 6, where Madeline and Theo are talking over the fire, is one of my most personally moving scenes in any art I've ever consumed. Theo asking what it's like to feel depressed, so he can better relate to his sister, who he adores but can't reach. Maddy choosing to share a description of it. The two of them hearing the other, supporting each other. Hearing his theme on guitar, with hers on the piano, coming together like two hands finding each other. In the years since, especially when I've felt hopeless and alone, I've played the Madeline and Theo theme and cried. You might like it too, but it hits different if you've heard the musical motifs across ~6-7 hair-pulling, challenging hours of platforming, deciding you could be a mountain climber so she could too.

There's nothing as powerful as a real connection. I think the taste of connecting with someone as my more real, post-breakup self led to me losing my mind for a few months over "Improbable Crush" from Love and Loving. I've also felt the pain of severing such a connection, and it was harder than my 2021 breakup. When I first played Celeste in 2018, I'm not sure I'd ever been open enough, to others or myself, to have had one of those life-affirming connections. But I was still seeking it, without having a name for it. Playing out that scene was like having water described to me after I'd spent decades wandering the desert. In the intervening years, I've had a swallow or two. It's maddening to keep seeking, but at least I know such a thing is possible.

Integration vs. "eliminating the part that sucks"

We'll start with a work anecdote. In the middle of my Ramp days, we interviewed a VP candidate who was very charming, but as the interview went on it got a little more unhinged. He'd been cleared by all our non-technical stakeholders, but as I talked to him more, he was telling the stories that sounded like Engineering Organization Success, but with details that sounded to me, a person who's worked the mines, like it would be miserable and unsustainable, actually. Additionally, he didn't seem to know or care much about tech in the absolute least, which I still believe matters.

I had plenty on which to base my evaluation, and checking the clock I saw I had 2 minutes left in the interview. This isn't enough time to launch into something substantive, so while this question isn't normally part of my repertoire, I think high-level candidates (like VPs) should be given the chance to excel on fluffy things like vision or narrative, and I asked a question I don't normally ask. It produced this exchange:

Pablo: Okay, we don't have much time left, but I'll throw something a little different out there. What question should I be asking you?

Him: Uh, what?

Pablo: In an interview like this, where someone in my position is evaluating someone in your position, what question should I have asked you, but didn't?

Him: That's a bullshit question. Ask me a real question.

Pablo, flabbergasted: A real question? What do you mean?

Him: I mean a not-bullshit question, like that one. I don't know, ask me what my humblebrag is.

Pablo: ... you already made a point to tell me the numbers of your previous exits. They were very impressive.

Him: Well what about you then, huh? What's your humblebrag?

Pablo: My... humblebrag?

Him: Yeah dude, what's your humblebrag?

Pablo: I... think... Do you just mean "brag"? It sounds like you just want me to brag? I don't see where "humble" fits into it?

Him: Yeah dude, what's your humblebrag?

Pablo (having to think really hard): Well, I got 201 berries in Celeste. I don't think that means anything to you though, but: it's hard as hell, and I don't know many other people who'd see it through. But... oh, whatever, I guess I'll go with "being founding engineer of a company last valued at [our valuation at the time]."

We didn't end up hiring him (it was closer than it should have been; he had other memorable zingers in my interview). My boss at the time said kind words about my interview feedback, but when he read over that exchange, he said:

You know what though? He's right. You're not good enough at bragging. We should fix that.

Meanwhile: for the past year or two, we'd had an employee at Ramp who's professional persona was antithetical to many of my core beliefs. He was showy. He gave orders without thinking. He had a whopping two (2) years of experience in industry but picked fights with people, online and at the company, about what he'd concluded to be "good software engineering." He talked way more than he listened. He did produce some good business outcomes (but they felt built on credit? like his tech would crumble given a medium-term horizon) and he was very charming. I had to clean up some of his messes, technical and social, and anticipated more in the future. Anytime he played his game and the company rewarded him (which they did, frequently), I'd feel my skin crawl.

But you know what? He was good at bragging. And I wasn't. Saurya had just shared with me something he saw on Twitter: "a judgement is a tragic expression of a need." When I was judging this guy, I suppose I was feeling a need—for validation, maybe? Of my approach? I needed the world to be one where my way worked better than his, it wasn't playing out that way, so instead I was judging him for it. There was definitely some jealousy, then subsequent embarrassment at being jealous of a know-nothing 24 year-old. He had a motivation for success-for-its-own-sake that seemed intrinsic to his being, whereas I'm still Catholic enough to feel like suffering means you're doing a good thing. But my manager's note, that crazy interview, and Saurya's observation provoked me to try changing my relationship with The Coworker: rather than use my brain to justify why his way was Wrong and mine was Right, I switched to asking "what can I learn from him?" when I noticed our differences. I starting with bragging.

Immediately, I felt lighter. He still annoyed me sometimes (I wasn't totally wrong; his tech did vomit really hard, in very embarrassing ways, a year after his departure) but it was life-giving to clear away so much resentment and replace it with curiosity, joy, and growth. I also got better at bragging! Sometimes, I even really enjoyed when our paths crossed. For a company full of magic moments, this was one of the biggest ones in the 4.5 years I was there.

Regarding Celeste, I love the message that "hating a part of yourself" is just lipstick-on-a-pig for "hating yourself." It can be very deceptive, and per the "load-bearing traumas," if you have a lot of experience hating yourself, it's very, very hard to reprogram the neurons to do something else. When I felt the jealousy and animus for this coworker, I hated that I felt that, and tried to push it away and pretend it was something else, something about the world, something defensible with my brain, something objective. My animus and jealousy were "you're the worst parts of me, and I hate you and wish you didn't exist," not "what are you trying to tell me?"

In Chapter 6 after the Theo conversation, when Madeline floats up and tries to release Badeline, she's using all the empowered language that sounds like Something Clean And Healthy Is Happening. "I'm not abandoning you, I'm setting you free" (drink, by the way, if you've heard this (or said this!) during a breakup. See also "Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?"). When I first played it, I was rooting for Maddy in that scene, and sensing I was on a milestone, I thought (and hoped) she might succeed. I wanted that for Maddy, as I've so frequently wanted that for me.

When Badeline wriggles out of this easily and gets especially terrifying, I was shocked. But despite having my expectations flipped, it also immediately made sense. One does not simply "want away" their demons. It's strange and sad that you often feel like you can barely function, but your depression seems to have Green Lantern-level superpowers to manifest whatever it needs at will, however improbable. You need to get out of bed, make lunch, and answer some texts? Sorry, no can do. Your depression wants to summon a giant tentacle, squeezing your air out, then throwing you to the bottom of a mountain you agonized to climb? "Sure thing!", says God, and now you can't breathe.

So the game's conclusion of letting you integrate with her is just so powerful, and masterfully executed on both storytelling and mechanical levels. "It's okay to be scared." Spending the game being chased by her out of fear, only to be the one chasing her out of love. Getting the second dash after integration and suddenly getting those superpowers to work for you. If someone had said the words "you need to be integrated" at any other point in my life, I don't think I would have any sense of what that means. Seeing this dialogue done out loud, between characters with whom I have a relationship with... it just all worked so well.

(also, did you know that in the piano score for the Summit, after the integration, is written for 4 hands?)

You will not get what you want out of life if you hate "a part of yourself," because it's you. There's no happy life to be had if it relies on "killing a part of yourself" to live it. You couldn't if you tried. Now, when I'm in a bad place, I ask myself what I'm needing, not feel shame for being there.

Additional links

• The Celeste golden strawberries that I recorded. I initially didn't make getting the golden strawberries an explicit goal; it's frankly too stupidly hard, and I didn't think I'd stick with it. "I mean, it's impossible, right? ... but what would it hurt to try? [tries] okay, that was a colossal failure. but I'll just practice the level anyway, it still feels nice to just play. [a few days later] wow, I can do it in under 20 deaths? maybe if I grind..." Before I knew it, I'd collected a fair number of them. Later, I started recording my runs, and I have the last 3 of them here. Luckily, they're the most challenging ones. Don't view on a cell phone network, I haven't optimized these videos for web and they'll eat up your data plan.

  • Summit B-Sides

  • Core B-Sides

  • Reflections B-Sides

  Note that if you skip to the end of them, especially 7b, you'll see me in my most unabashed, happy places, where I can't stop smiling.

• I wrote a D&D one-shot with a very weird premise that was modeled after Celeste's Mirror Temple. It's not trivial to run from the notes but I still think the core conceit is neat, and if you want to mess with your players, I encourage you to steal it. I love how high-stakes it is.

• "Canonically," Madeline's last name is McButt. She's Madeline McButt. Her mom's name is Momeline. She's 7 feet tall, loves drinking Mr. Pibb, and her backpack is full of spiders. This all came from a creator Q&A, who I think was mostly poking fun at the idea of "canon."

• I never played these as much, but there are spinoffs and sequels by the creators. See the "Nintendo 64"-like project "Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain," or Celeste Classic 2: Lani's Trek, a PICO-8 platformer like the original Celeste.

• The mod scene makes the game endlessly replayable. I only got through about 20% of the 2020 Spring Community Collab and it's unbelievable what people have done, how creative they are, what kinds of mechanics they've put it. Really, just... you could play nothing else if you wanted to. I also played Quickie Mountain 2, which has a delightful soundtrack.