Dancing on my own in Celeste 64

“Borne on the Wavedash of the Heart” or, dancing on my own in Celeste 64.

Evan Robins

20240214

In September of 2020, I picked up Celeste.

I’d bought the game that summer—another pandemic acquisition after I found myself at loose ends having beaten The Last of Us Part II.

There it sat, like so many other games, in the recesses of my itch.io library for the rest of the summer. In the interim I played much worse games like God of War 3, and Just Cause 4. I started and subsequently abandoned God of War (2018). I clocked 400 hours in Call of Duty: Warzone, and another dozen or so in Apex: Legends.

Gradually my life began to change. I moved cities from Ottawa to Peterborough. I started attending Trent University. I began taking feminizing hormones. At some point amid all these things, I picked up Celeste.

One has to understand that 2020 was mostly a very bad year for anyone extremely passionate about school. Every class was online, every classroom a black mirror peppered with name tags. Even those who turned on their cameras represented a sea of severed heads.

I had enrolled in a number of classes outside of my chosen discipline of Cultural Studies. That semester I was taking a Political Science class which I really enjoyed. I would talk to my seminar leader—an avowed Marxist with a Ph.D.—about Michel Foucault while the other students struggled to stay awake at 9:00 AM in front of their computers.

The class which made me start Celeste was not, however, this one.

I entered university a woman who’d spent the bulk of her life being a man who made reading pieces of continental philosophy the bulk of her personality. My longstanding self-hatred manifested in an obsession with Jean-Paul Sarte, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Albert Camus, and a depressive reverence for the music of Kurt Cobain and Joy Division. I even owned the shirt.

Being as I was—an aspiring intellectual—I chose for one of my electives PHIL1100H: Introduction to Philosophy: Moral and Political.

In the full course of my time at Trent University it remains, indisputably, the worst class I have ever taken.

Every week, the professor would pull up the week’s reading—handily available in the most printer-burned PDFs known to man—and read for them, without interruption for the better part of the two-hour class. At the end of this period of time he would let us ask questions for a period of ~10 minutes, before corralling us into a number of breakout rooms where we were expected to conduct engaging discussions about the week’s readings under the threat that he would drop in at inopportune moments to grade us for participation.

I hated this class. I hated this class so much I decided I might hate philosophy. A number of us in this class made a group chat—nominally to help us study—which amounted to largely to us bemoaning our shared suffering at the hands of this prof on a weekly basis.

I wrote the class’ midterm—a 35% paper—on Kant, and left with 69%, to date the lowest mark I’ve received in post-secondary. The class average was 54%. How’s that for nice?

By the third week of class I was so disillusioned and checked out that I resigned myself to playing video games for the duration of the class each week. I would project a game of my choosing onto my second monitor, position my webcam so that it appeared I was paying attention, and hush the Zoom call till it was barely audible while I distracted myself for two hours while fulfilling my attendance requirements.

It’s not as if I was missing anything, after all, I had already done the readings which the prof regurgitated each week.

In the absence of the simulacrum human camaraderie afforded through the vessel of the Zoom screen, I immersed myself fully and completely into Celeste.

The first time I booted up Celeste I was sitting alone in bed. It was late at night. The sun had gone down hours ago, leaving me to sit in the overpowering semi-darkness of my vast dorm room (I remain, to this day, adverse to turning on any overhead light). My roommate, in the bedroom beside mine of our shared apartment-style dorm, had long since gone to bed. The other person with whom we shared the space was gone, having moved in and just as soon functionally moved out to live with his girlfriend.

The bedroom I occupied was intended for two people. Because of the present threat of novel coronavirus infection, the university had removed one of its two twin beds, shoved the other against the furthest wall of the room, and branded it a single instead. The room was so big that no amount of clutter could ever make it look lived in. The scale of it dwarfed the twin bed in which I slept, tucked away in the furthest corner. Shadows licked at my bedside every night as I slept.

Sitting there, with late fall snow and winds rattling the rotted window panes, I felt alone. The screen of my computer bathed me in blue light. The game’s menu music scored the darkness around me. I stared at that screen for ten solid minutes before I so much as pressed the action button.

Celeste quickly became my most steadfast companion of that year. Every week I would log onto Zoom and pull up the game on my other screen. Its score would flood my ears over my professor’s drone. Its motions became second nature to me as they burned into muscle memory.

Mere months after having my brain chemistry irrevocably re-aligned by my time re-experiencing The Last of Us, Celeste did the trick twice as well. I had to resist the urge in class to not pump my fist every time I completed a boss section, or beat a screen without dying, or without even once touching the ground.

By the end of the semester the exact dimensions of every level had etched themselves into my memory. I was doing “Forsaken City” in less than five minutes and consistently getting every berry. My reviled philosophy class had long since ended. I’d passed with a 79%.

I was still playing Celeste.

By the beginning of 2021, I was closing in on 100%ing the base game, just because I could.

Besides my then-roommate, whom I no longer talk to, I saw barely anyone over the course of that school year. The people I’d met in the first weeks of moving into residence quickly started to argue, and fall out of favour with one another, as they began to realize they didn’t much like one another when not doing drugs or having sex with each other.

My classmates and teachers were steadfast in their presence, though always at eye’s length—a screen and, in their own way, a world away.

I saw my parents on reading breaks and holidays, but they too were worlds apart from me. I, who had always been their son, was becoming their daughter, and doing so 300km away while living on my own.

In time, everyone I knew became a recluse and—lacking the will to be different—I too would eventually follow.

In the non-time of the pandemic world, Celeste became my sole companion. Untethered from my own humanity by the million screens which made up my slice of purgatory, the feeling of my Dualshock 4 resting in my hand became the greatest proof of my own corporeality.

Stuck in the pseudo-jail of a quarantined Canadian winter, Celeste became my only way to move.

In the absence of human contact, intuiting how to hyper dash might aa well be corollary to one’s first time finding the clit.

Celeste is a game about climbing a mountain, which is actually a game about being trans. Just like climbing a mountain, transition is a journey; everyone has their own mountain.

I wrote those words in a 2020 zine I called GRRRLHOOD. Therein, I wrote that I hate transition narratives, and held Celeste up as the antidote.

I stand by that feeling to this day—If it’s not by Torrey Peters or a feature-length essayistic illegal Joker movie, I don’t want to see it. Not everything needs to be trauma porn and not every trans woman should write a memoir. If you decide you have to, though, please don’t leave out any anecdotes about shitting in cardboard boxes.

“Madeline’s journey is not about the clinical side, nor the coming out experience,” I wrote in December of 2020. “It is about reckoning with the aftermath—the journey that continues for a month, a year, a lifetime after you come out.”

“Because even after those films, and books, and TV shows end, your transition is not over.

“You still have to wake up every day.

“It’s a mountain you spend your entire life climbing.”

Since I wrote those words Celeste has continued to change. While the game has not been updated since shortly after Chapter 9 released in September of 2019, its spirit has persisted in other ways. In 2021, developers Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry released Celeste Classic 2: Lani’s Trek, in commemoration of the game’s third anniversary.

At The Game Awards the next year, their studio—Extremely OK Games—announced that their next game, Earthblade would release sometime in 2024.

Well, here we are in 2024, and a new Celeste game has just been released.

Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain is a 3D-platformer remake of the first level of the 2018 game done in the style of the Nintendo 64. The game reimagines Celeste’s setting, mechanics, and score in chunky, polygonal depth and chiptuned synths in the vein of said console's Super Mario 64.

It’s entrancing how good Celeste 64 is, for what it is (and what it is is a free-to-play game with maybe 5 hours of gameplay for the lay-gamer, if that).

The menus are fuzzy around the edges, like the haze of old CRT TVs. The overworld’s score carries the dream-like quality of Mario 64’s “Dire, Dire Docks;” the B-sides’ that of Super Mario Sunshine’s acapella-scored secret courses.

Madeline feels fluid and weighty in three dimensions, her momentum allowing her to dance around the map as though able to fly.

Fragments reimagines Madeline’s iconic mobility kit for use in this strange new world. She can climb, wall-jump, and—of course—air dash, all in a manner more suited to navigating an additional axis. Between these variations and the myriad movement tech from the 2018 game on whose theme they riff, it's hard to imagine a world in which Celeste's plucky heroine could be justifiably excluded from a future Super Smash Bros. (but let's not get ahead of ourselves).

At its bones though, it’s still Celeste. The score is different, sure, and it looks a whole lot more voluminous, but the core gameplay loop persists. You start, you die a lot, you sit back and appreciate the score before continuing to die a lot. Gradually, over time, you start to get better.

In a 2022 essay I noted that “At the end of the first level of Celeste, ‘Forsaken City,’ the game’s protagonist, Madeline, rests on a plateau upon which rests a plaque with the inscription: ‘This memorial dedicated to those Who perished on the climb.’

“This memorial serves many purposes.

“Textually, it serves a remembrance of those who die on Celeste Mountain.

“Celeste is a game where the player dies a lot.

“Like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and other games widely lauded for their difficulty, Celeste is a punishing, if deeply rewarding challenge. The player has likely died many dozen times before reaching this plaque.

“Many players may not ever finish the game.

“On a second order of signification, the message signals this, alongside many other implicit meanings. Madeline is a trans woman, and many trans women inevitably die as a result of the social circumstances which conspire to form the ‘climb’ of transition.”

Today, I know that if the SoulsBorne games are “punishing” in their difficulty, Celeste has always been cathartic. Yes, the climb is difficult—and I’m talking from experience here—but it is inevitably worth it. The most fun I’ve had with Bloodborne was receiving a blowjob while fighting the Cleric Beast. By contrast, in Celeste, even the struggle is part of the fun.

In bringing you not simply to, but rather through your lowest, Celeste humanizes even the most grueling of ludic experiences. There are no ‘lives’ in Celeste as in other, worse videogames. It’s significant, however, that the game tells you exactly how many times you died each time you get to the end of the level.

The game is not gloating, it’s encouraging you. Next time you start over again, maybe that number won’t be as high. Just because the climb never ends, doesn’t mean we can never learn to get better at it.

Celeste is designed to forgive you for your mistakes, and if you start to get good enough, this leniency affords you the ability to do some really crazy shit.

Celeste 64 takes that ethos and applies it to the third dimension, turning a challenging open-concept parkour arena into a sandbox for speedrunners and completionists. Mere days after the game was released, somebody clocked a 15-second speedrun time because—well, that’s just what Celeste players do.

If Celeste looks forward, even inadvertently, and reaches out to our future selves, Fragments takes a moment to relish in how far we’ve come. It doesn’t have to be the best game of all time (which it isn’t, to be clear, though it comes damn close) to be one of the most significant games in this year—and my life—to date.

There have been times in the relatively short duration of my transition where I revisit things—people, places, events, moments, memories—only to find they’ve somewhat lost their shine. Our travels have taken us worlds apart, and now neither of us have the time or energy to climb the mountain between us.

Other times, fewer and further between, I’ve been surprised at how easily it all comes back. Old friends slip into their respective places. Jokes flow easily and candidly. Time resumes like a cassette tape unfrozen from the moment it paused.

I cheered, out loud, when I realized that you can still hyper dash in Celeste 64.

In that same essay I quoted earlier, I said that “I’ve neither the patience nor the opportunity given the modest word count to which I’m holding myself here to explain, in a way that proves satisfactory, why it is that transgender women so frequently gravitate towards video games as both hobby and professional practice.”

I continued, however, that “If I were to take a stab at doing so, I’d posit that for many who feel outwardly disconnected from their social gendered experience, the venue of interactive entertainment proves a potent form of escapism.

“Being as video games have historically been marketed towards boys, it follows that those ‘boys,’ having found solace in this nascent, weird, and expressive medium should return to it as full-grown women entering the workplace.”

So why does all this matter?

Well, it matters, to me, because it’s Valentine’s Day.

I’m on the record as saying I hate this day for a myriad snarky reasons which I stand by—in principle, at least—even now. However, even I am not above sentimentality, and today it so happens that a dinky 64-bit 3-d platformer has elicited some semblance of emotion from my notoriously stoic facade.

The Evan Robins sincerity hour strikes twice a year, and by Goddess is it happening today.

Celeste has been here for as long as I’ve been a woman, and that’s not something I can say of many things—and something I certainly can’t of a significant number of the people whom I’ve known.

At a time when I felt I was more profoundly alone than ever in my then even-briefer life, Celeste taught me that I had myself. I am my own person, on my journey, making my own way to the summit in my own time. It doesn’t matter how many times I die along the way, as long as I’m still here; as long as I’m still trying.

It’s for that reason that the first and only person to whom I will ever be married is me—and to be clear, I do absolutely mean that in a weird clone-fucking way. I don’t believe in the institution of marriage as a rule, and I’ve learned through many Valentine’s Days in my own company (and one sorrowful Mistki-scored lesbian breakup of which we do not speak) that my own company is plenty enough for me.

When I come home, it is and always will be to the same woman every night. She’s slack-jawed and bleary-eyed, and like hell is she high-maintenance, but when she looks in the mirror and takes off her clothes there’s no woman I’d rather be.

I’m not saying I intend to forswear all future belaytionships, though I will say that climbing solo has its merits.

Sorry to all my loyal fans, your proposals are both noted and appreciated.

It’s perhaps fitting that a synthesizer-scored game about rock climbing has been the one to lodge itself so firmly in my present feminine psyche. I’ve said before that Celeste is trans culture, and while that doesn’t preclude my love of kinetic, gory, ultra-violent video games, or cerebral and introspective horror fiction, Celeste will always hold a unique and special place in my heart.

It feels good to come full circle writing about Celeste as snow streams past my window, and the sun dips below the horizon—just as it did four years ago (more or less) when I first heard the chime of its menu SFX.

I can’t pretend that I’m not excited for Earthblade—I talk about wanting to interview its developers literally every time it’s brought up in conversation—though in this moment I can’t help but be melancholic that this, in many ways, feels like it might be the end of Celeste.

That’s okay. Everyone’s moving on with their lives—it’s only natural that things like this should happen. If all goes according to plan, I should be graduating this year, and then, well, the world is full of mountains to climb.

The conversation between Madeline and Granny at the beginning of Fragments illustrates this sort of phenomenon—of moving on but not moving without.

Granny remarks that she hasn’t seen Madeline in a long time, and expresses how impressed she is that Madeline is writing a book. She asks if Madeline’s come back to Celeste Mountain because she’s “Nervous about the big project?”, to which Madeline replies that no, she’s “weirdly zen about the book.”

“Besides,” she asks. “Can’t I just revisit a beloved memory without being interrogated?”

Granny chuckles. “I know there’s more to it, but I won’t pry.”

I’m coming to terms with the fact that one day I will leave Arthur. Indeed, in some ways I can’t wait to leave, because I’d never willingly deprive anybody of the same wonderful experience that my time at this masthead has been. This is not Farewell—not yet, at least—though it’s an acknowledgement that one day this too shall pass.

It feels too like Thorson and the rest of the EXOK team are going out on one last hurrah before Earthblade—revisiting a beloved memory before wandering into the great green ether beyond.

The last four years have seen a great deal of change in my life—a perennial source of writing inspiration—though the two constants besides myself half always been Celeste and Arthur. For as long as I’ve written professionally I’ve wanted to write about this game, and for as long as I’ve played this game I’ve wanted to write about it in full.

There’s a draft in my Google Drive for a video essay several tens of thousands of words long that just about approaches doing so, though far be it from me to say if I’ll ever actually finish it. It uses big words like “belabour,” and “transbian,” and “Ludonarrative synthesis.” I like using big words, and I like putting indulgent subheadings the like of “Borne on the Wavedash of the Heart” in my writing.

Come to think of it, that’s probably what I should call this.

I made the claim there that “Celeste marries narrative and gameplay through suffering,” and I think that gets at the crux of what I’m trying to say. What Celeste does well it does not in spite of being a hard game, or a game about such things as depression, or gender dysphoria but at least, in part because of it.

Because Celeste is a game about confronting yourself. Because loving someone is always a losing battle, especially when that someone is you.

The first time I heard the first verse of “Liability” by Lorde, I cried myself to sleep. It was 2:00 in the morning. I was a boy. I didn’t want to be a boy. If anything, at that moment I didn’t want to be alive.

Playing through Celeste 64 hours into the dark night, having gotten off Fortnite minutes before, with only the glow of candles and christmas lights to illuminate my room, took me back to a place I didn’t know I’d ever been before. Like the first notes of a favourite album, the hum of something that is both so foreign and yet so intimately familiar debones you, it reaches out a figurative hand like an old lover to say “See? Look how far we made it.”

Much as you’d never willingly let go, something will give eventually. Life moves ever onward, and in time even mountains are swept bare by wind and rain.

We did not deserve Celeste 64. I did not deserve Celeste 64. Certainly the people on itch.io erroneously claiming the game is “one of the worst 3d platformers [they’ve] ever played” did not deserve Celeste 64.

Were I obliged to characterize the last four years of my life as they presently stand, I would right now describe them as the process of writing into existence the woman I am today.

Words fail in the face of the hundreds of thousands of them I’ve committed to this masthead, each one a testament to the act of me finding myself.

I’m going to miss Celeste. I’m going to miss it immensely. Even though it’ll still be there, on my hard drive, always waiting for the next quiet moment when I’m compelled to boot it up, play through its first level again—badly—and reminisce about my first time(s), it’ll still feel different now that I know it's over.

I wonder, now, if Arthur writers before me feel the same way about their work, etched unchangingly into the pages of the archive to which I find myself the present steward. Will future Trent students, trans women, internauts, stumble across my words as I have done with Arthur authors before me, and writers whom I revere to this day?

It’s weird to think about having a legacy at my age, though even now I realize that one day it’s going to be someone else writing musings like these, and rooting around in the innards of this website to make them appear.

Selfishly, I think a part of me wonders if my work will outlive me, no matter how soon (or far-off) such a day will come.

Maybe that’s why I do this—write around things—wring out my feelings like I’m laundering tears in the hopes that someone will see more than just a girl embracing herself whispering that it’s going to be okay.

To anyone reading this would it not just seem a woman dancing alone, arm in arm with her own reflection?

Every time I look in the mirror I hear the first notes of “Little Goth,” and every time it snows outside I imagine the pitter-patter of “First Steps.” Celeste gave me my own mountain, and its dimensions are ones I trace even to this day. If my writing can ever replicate such a feat—to turn the camera on the reader, to turn the mode to the second-person, to change the way you see yourself in the mirror—I think it would mean that I’ve done something right.

Life is a lonely pursuit at the best of times. I get the feeling that trying to know people is about as easily done as orienteering in a snowstorm. There’s an inherent beauty in the sheer chaos of it, but when you’re in the thick of it that might prove hard to appreciate.

What I can appreciate is that while we all die alone, we don’t live far apart. We all climb mountains all our life, and in that fact we can all take solace.

Today we are alive. Tomorrow we might not be, though for now we remain ourselves.

If nothing else, may these words act as a signpost as you climb your own mountains.