Why Does Celeste Make Us Feel Anxious?

Nintendo are the kings of making fun, expressive platformers - but Mario's dominance has meant that his fun-first design has overshadowed different kinds of platformers, and that's a shame! Fear, stress, anxiety, frustration - all of these things can be used as the core emotion to build a game around, and doing this can lead to some great experiences - but how? and why? The Architect is going to double-jump their way into some tricky platformers to find out the answers to exactly those questions.

You Saw-

Super Mario Galaxy 2 - 2010
New Super Luigi Bros - 2013 (the year of Luigi)
Super Mario 3D World - 2013
Super Mario Sunshine- 2002
Mario Odyssey- 2017
Shovel Knight- 2014 (Btw I got King of Cards for free from yacht club even though I already owned shovel knight so I guess that's my disclosure)
DOOM- 2016
Resident Evil 7- 2017
Celeste- 2017
Bad North- 2017
Grow Home- 2016
Super Meat Boy- 2010
Sonic Adventure 2- 2001
Sonic Mania- 2017
Sonic Generations- 2011
Sonic Unleashed- 2008
Sonic The Hedgehog - 1991
Sonic Forces - 2017
Sonic Adventure - 1999
GRIS - 2018
A Short Hike- 2019
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons- 2013
Getting Over It- 2017
Dark Souls- 2012
XCOM: Enemy Unknown- 2012
Kirby Star Allies- 2018
Darkest Dungeons- 2015
Journey to the Savage Planet- 2020

[awayname]

Or you know. You could go for the golden strawberries and experience advanced anxiety.

[Spritesuit]

>Talking about Shovel Knight.
>"Chaotic Momentum"
_>King Knight._
Plague Knight: Am I a joke to you?

[Corrupted]

These darker, more mature games always seem to be way more relaxing and comforting though.
I genuinely enjoy getting lost in art, when there's more to a game than just "fun gameplay" it's much easier for me to relax and actually get immersed

[MrMunchABC]

Climbing a mountain has been a symbol of adversity since mountains existed-- I think it's very neat to see that cultural shorthand so commonly adapted to games, and I think it's all the easier because climbing and platforming is so well represented in games. Thrown on top of that, upward momentum/moving up the screen feels *really* good. I think Getting Over It is the game I've most seen explore the feeling of going *down* the screen, but that ultimately facilitates the dopamine of climbing back up.
Anyways, awesome video as always!

[DarylTalksGames]

5:51 couldn't agree more. Sometimes I feel like the game is designed to be *just* tough enough so that you finish hard sections and consistently say, "how the hell did I do that?"

[Gaswafers]

When you are depressed, doing anything seems as difficult and pointless as climbing a mountain.

[dondashall]

Celeste's breathing exercise alone (let alone what the rest of the themes has done for my anxiety) has helped me enormously much in coping with anxiety better. It's the best breathing exercise I've ever tried and I really didn't expect that from a game. It's fantastic in so many ways. Easily the best representation of mental health in games.

[subprogram]

We can also add Death Stranding to the list of 'evocative games about climbing mountains', cos that constitutes at least 1/3rd of the game I think. :P

[ansel]

Celeste made me cry. It really was such an emotional journey from start to finish, and the level design is so masterful at inducing those emotions. I also love the story being so blunt about its meaning. It could have easily relied on just the level design to convey that, but the forwardedness and rawness of it brings it all together into a really amazing experience. Seriously, if you haven't played Celeste yet, do it !

[tlsgrz]

I, for one, accept near perfect alien Adam as my new game design content overlord. All hail near perfect alien Adam.

[cinderheart]

>Didn't say "Maybe Getting Over It will help you to...get over it."
0/10 missed the obvious joke.

[jackanderson]

15:10 wait a minute, Undertale starts with you climbing a mountain too.

[recht_voor_zijn_raap]

"Because all his games are so damn happy:

*Super Paper Mario* :
"Ima gonna stop you right there"

[tungstendioxide]

12:29 "you might recognize "Getting over it" as the favorite of the shouty let'splay people of few years back.'

Me: Did you just said few years ago?

[WireFTW]

13:08: "simply getting Diogenes to do what you what him to, is a challenge in itself"


seems about right

[gerdhagen]

"A short hike" seems to be the same game process as Grow Up / Home, which you showed before. At the start your character is heavily limited, but with time and stuff collected, you can move around more and more freely. It really gives you a good sense of progression.

[screeeee]

man a short hike has the most immaculate vibes ever, finally climbing the mountain and watching the sunset before jumping off the peak to fly, not glide anymore, with all 20 feathers one last time felt amazing.

[pointystories]

Another emotional game about climbing a mountain: Journey

[cabopineforest]

*watch the first ~2 minutes*
*check the title in case you opened the wrong video*
*no, it's right, it's celeste*

[chickensangwich]

This is so great. I’ve struggled with anxiety as long as I can remember, but just recently — through a lot of therapy, support groups, personal growth, etc — I’ve gotten to a much better place and ease of managing it. Celeste spoke to me in a really personal way, as I think it did a lot of people. I also went through Madeline’s journey of realizing you can’t fight the things you hate about yourself. They’re a part of you. You have to embrace it, accept it, and learn to love it in order to find peace and growth and happiness.

Anyway, on a game design note. You alluded to this but I wanted to say it out loud: anyone notice how Mario levels are typically open plains with only one or two things to focus on at a time, while Celeste levels are dense and cramped and force you to skirt around obstacles in narrow spaces just to advance a few pixels of screen distance? Just the visual experience of looking at a level in Celeste is already anxiety-inducing. There’s so much going on! So much that can kill me! So many moving parts and things to keep track of and AAAA! But as you try and fail and try some more, you come to see each part of each screen as one piece of a cohesive whole, and realize what you need to do, which skills the screen is testing, and how to accomplish the task. Just like any anxiety-inducing problem, the key is not to panic, but to break the problem down to its constituent parts and handle it one bit at a time.

Also, no other game delivers the same feeling of mastery and growth as Celeste did for me. There’s only three player actions, like you said, and each level only has a handful of gimmicks. But as you come to understand each of those mechanics and gimmicks on a deeper and deeper level, you’ll find yourself doing things on your first try you never even thought possible before. It is so much a game about pushing past your previous limits and becoming more than you thought you could.

Celeste is often compared to Dark Souls just because they’re both hard. But Dark Souls is all about crushing the player under a feeling of hopelessness and oppressive difficulty, which makes it rewarding when you seemingly defy the game by overcoming it anyway. In contrast, it’s clear from the get-go that Celeste deeply wants you to succeed. Dark Souls’ punishing death mechanic is its most iconic feature, but deaths in Celeste are a complete non-event, just another step on the road to achievement. The game even has a pop-up early on encouraging players to think of their death counter as a good thing, a sign of how far you’ve come. All in all, Celeste is such a heartfelt and wholesome experience, and deeply, perfectly Canadian.