Modern games you’ll still be playing in years to come

How a platforming masterpiece mixing hardcore challenge and a personal tale about mental health is able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the some of the greatest games in the genre

Words by Paul Walker-Emig

info

» System: PC

» Year: 2018

» Publisher: Extremely OK Games

» Developer: Matt Makes Games

» Key People: Maddy Thorson, Noel Berry

GO DEEPER

» There are hints in the game that the main character, Madeline, is a trans woman. This was later confirmed by developer Maddy Thorson.

» The game’s mountain was named Celeste after the team googled British Columbian mountains and liked the name Mount Celeste.

[PC] Rooms are often coated in spikes, leaving no room for error.

CELESTE

THE BACKGROUND

Matt Makes Games came to prominence as a studio for creating the closest thing to a ‘killer-app’ the ill-fated Ouya console ever had in the form of the 2013 release, TowerFall. Whispers about the multiplayer arena-battler’s brilliance erupted into a chorus of praise as soon as it left the confines of the Ouya and made its way onto PC and PS4 as TowerFall Ascension in 2014, hailed as a leading light among a spate of indie games breathing new life into local-multiplayer gaming at the time. The game’s perfectly precise mechanics suggested that this was a studio with the potential to create a spectacular platformer in the single-player space and so it proved to be with its next project.