Celeste, Germinal, & Videogame Plagiarism 

Wow... i dont normally give much thought to claims of videogame plagiarism but this is so blatant lmao

At this point they should've just made a mod for Celeste.

Great video, very high quality and am happy to see someone talk about this topic and point this out

Y'know, I usually don't care if a game takes "inspiration" or whatever, in fact I think it's fairly good to do so, I feel like the fact that you could remake this entire game within Celeste using mods with minimal effort outside coding the movement mechanics speaks for itself.

2:23 Okay, hold on. Having 3 save files attacked on top of each other is almost ubiquitous, no matter what kind of game you're playing

I think this game would be good as a celeste mod. For how talented these people are and how fun this game would be to play, it would be fun to play this as a mod for Celeste, or a free fan game. This being it’s own game that probably isn’t free definitely isn’t the best seeing how similar it is to celeste. If this was a free fan game or mod to celeste I think it would get much more praise seeing how fun it probably would be to play.

I feel like Germinal is to Celeste what Spark the Electric Jester or Freedom Planet is to Sonic the Hedgehog. They're games born from love for those properties, that borrow a lot of stuff from their sources of inspiration, but are honestly just trying to create more of that fun the creators had felt from the originals. It feels a bit reductive to me to say that that's a bad thing.

thanks for letting me know to buy this game

I think this is more of a project out of passion for celeste. Because it clearly has a lot of effort and attention to detail behind it, and it had potential. But in the end it never had anything to separate it from celeste. It had the skill, it had the care, it just didn’t have a direction.

"Plagiarism" is a pejorative. There's nothing wrong with pastiche. The only people they are hurting is themselves by not going far enough to give their game a unique identity and feeling.

Celeste is my favorite game but I also completed Germinal and I can say that the amount of similarity didn't one bit take away from the experience. It's also interesting that you brought up the save slots while Germinal's phone like UI was definitely a highlight and was very original. Plus the main mechanic is definitely closer in nature to a double jump, and adding a hover on top of that makes for some unique energy management, almost like if in Celeste dashing cost a bit of stamina. I personally don't mind this kind of "plagiarism"

Maybe I'm too biased, but idrk. But Celeste's art just looks SO much more satisfying and pleasing to the eyes. [Edit]: LMAO 4:51, I've tried this game. It was SO bad. I could write a book about all poor writing choices and gameplay tomfoolery they did in this.

Very nice video! Editing is incredibly clean

I mean Bug Fables takes a trillion things from Paper Mario but people are fine with that. Though I think the difference is Bug Fables is generally understood to be a Paper Mario fan game in everything but name while this game is just said to be Celeste-"inspired".

this rocked, u shoudl do more things like it ! good length too c:

Very good video! I'm a big Celeste fan, and I've never heard of Germinal before. But this game got me intrigued. Is it really just a rip off? It appears to be a bit polished, as opposed to "Frozen Dream". But a few things really got me irked, like the growing hazards that look like dust bunnies, similar room designs, the death animation and level transition. As for the pixel art and movement arc, I find it hard to blame the devs for it. It looks and feels good...

It's weird seeing this on a platform that isn't the mobile marketplace :/

Why do I feel like they just took the Celeste C# Project Debug File, Ran it through ILspy, copied every single thing from it (might not have 100% copied it but there probably exists code references) made obvious changes to everything visually that is not affected by a Shader and that's it, cause I swear that engine feels exactly the same as that of Celeste, Visually by all the Shaders, and even by the Physics, it would be interesting to go through the demo files of this game to see how much they actually copied or referenced, cause I am damn sure it's written in C# as well

My person opinion is: The gameplay is original enough to be its own game however the artstyle and design choices are too similar to Celeste. They should try putting their own style into it. It has the potential to be a stand alone game

As a (wannabe, 1:03:56 pb) Celeste speedrunner: This is basically just "copy my homework but change it up a bit" except EXOK hasn't signed off on it I do like some parts of the tilesets though, even though the dash mechanic looks confusing And at that point, just mod Celeste with Everest Also, the dash blocks have the same dot inside of it as the dash blocks in ch5 :3

Even the background movement of the power lines looks similar

I am not entirely sure about how to feel about this. On one hand, it definitely feels wrong. On the other, this is kind of how some genres of video games grew. DOOM kickstarted the FPS genre, and for a while almost every FPS was a "DOOM clone", in a similar fashion to how Germinal is a "clone" of Celeste. The problem is that we are so far past the beginner stages of the platformer genre, so does that make this behavior of "cloning" wrong?

When I take inspiration from something I really like, sometimes I find myself almost copying it, not because I wanted to do that, but because I just really like that thing. What I do when I find myself in such a situation is to try and rethink what I have done. I want the thing I'm inspired by to be visible, but I also don't want it to look like a copy. These developers could accidentally have made a clone of Celeste in there atempt to create something they think is good, but if that is the case and they didn't realised the mistake they have made I can only feel sorry for them.

v-ida-o essay

It's really weird that they chose to copy so many small things. The game looks decent and outside of dustbunnies most mechanics are basic enough that I don't think them on their own would be an issue, but then why is the artstyle so similar? The VFX, level select, tutorial?

Imma be honest I think they should market this as a Fangame

Honestly, I don't care that much, if the game is good, It's fine. But if it's not...

Famous quote- "Amateurs copy, artists steal". I heard it in the context of music originally but the idea extends further. I agree with a couple of the other comments here; while it's a bit unsettling, it's definitely a passion project made in honor and out of inspiration of Celeste. We'll see how the story pans out.

I just tweeted this and tagged you but YOU CAN LITERALLY NEUTRAL JUMP

vibeo good

While I definitely believe there is a certain line between stealing a games mechanics / style and taking inspiration from it, I feel like in some cases it should be ok to near-replicate another game and release it, as long as you're not literally remaking the exact mechanics, story, levels and so on. If it's not broke, don't fix it. I see it almost as no different from modding games, except it's from the ground up, you have creative freedom to do whatever you want and you might get paid for it.

I think most of the stuff you said are a bit of a stretch

I don't care if they copied how celeste looks tbh, as long as it's a good game, and they didn't steal code or assets that weren't made available by the devs, I'm cool with it.

i actually support germinal, because its clear its being made out of love for celeste, and not just to rip it off.

>Objective way. I think it began as objective, but only pointing out the similarities and not the differences seems like a huge red flag for biased criticism. At the very beginning of the video, you trash Germinal and praise Celeste, which doesn't seem very objective right out of the game. But maybe you just really enjoy Celeste. But it's weird to mention speed running tech when Germinal isn't out yet. So how can you comment on that if the game isn't out yet? Here's a big difference that I don't really see you touch on at all. Wave dashing. Wave dashing and (extended) hyper dashing are pretty big level design throughout the game, allowing for skips that the EXOK games designed on purpose as well as hidden hearts that require it. You also don't point out that there's a float mechanic which is VERY different compared to Celeste's design, more so looking like Peach's float from Mario 2 but also enabling a player to dash out of it. Simply adding a float changes the how the developer has to design a level. Like think of the big chasm in Celeste in 1A that requires either a extended hyper to keep your dash and get across or a momentum block. That entire level is made trivial with the ability to float. at 2:50 you seem to point out a similarity of the room, but a MAJOR difference in that same room. Germinal, when the character touches a surface, it leaves behind a spike obstacle. Although the design does look similar to Celeste, that entire mechanic is very different. In Celeste, it is only set blocks that have little designations that tell you "Oh, if you stand here, spikes will appear after you leave making you think where to stand on the journey back." In Germinal, it looks like its every surface, most likely to combat your ability to float. In conclusion, this seems like a half hearted attempt at some views by throwing a beginner game developer under the bus. Your editing was great, you have good prose, and you seem like a fan of games. But the lack of research annoyed me to no end. You could have defined what plagiarism is, which is "noun. the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own." and referred to it as fair use instead. Because fair use law is more digestible and interactable than picking out how plagiarism works. Yes, you have stated that you aren't aware of laws or the technical side of the game to be able to make a call... so why not do some research and make those calls in the video? That point of this video is to send a strong message to fellow youtuber watchers and the content creator on what kind of content I would actually want to see. In short, go watch FUNKe or Leon Massey instead.

....Is it just me or was there more to Germinal's dash than just a dash? I'm pretty sure you could hover similar in a way in super mario sunshine...

aiaiai

time to become radicalized by you tube video essay

Like a lot of people have said in your comments, the editing is incredible. Yet, I think this game isn't as plagiarist as some other titles I've seen. The mechanics of the game look sufficiently different from Celeste, the dash blocks are a bit slower, the 3-file menu is just a standard at this point, and the physics look a little different. However, I do think you make a good point about the collectibles, level menus and especially the visual concept. This video was overall well polished and interesting, keep up the great work, but some of the points were a bit too nit-picky and not really plagiarizing enough to complain about, in my opinion.

what the actual f

Some of the stuff is just dishonest but it's clear that it's not just inspired and i think that's already clear with the dash mechanic The main thing i wanted to know about the game is: what makes it different from celeste, gameplay wise? Yeah, of course the levels are going to be different but the dash is kinda of what makes celeste unique, it's not knew but the level design around it and the way it's implemented is super original, different from rhis Germinal game

Jajaja queríamos otro juego como celeste, pero no un plagio de celeste. Hay mucha diferencia entre ambas cosas... La gente ya no sabe qué hacer...

*Loud incorrect buzzer*

i mean, no ill will to the devs it just feels like they r shooting themselves in the foot, a lot of effort to make a game thats so easy to write off. The fludd type thing deff has some unique features but if im just gonna be doing mirror temple again thn i will not be playing

The german team might have made a competent game but It's more of a clone than an actual hommage. It's basically Celeste with another skin.

The dust bunnies are identical lmao didn't even try

Who else came here from the cohost post

They look way too similar, art style, level design, mechanics Its like they just looked what celeste did and copied it

I actually disagree with your sentiment here. This game and the creator have stated that they took a LOT of inspiration from celeste and that is certainly hard to miss, but I feel like you accounted too many things as just something taken from celeste. I would look into the game Crowsworn, it was also berraded for being an "obvious plagerism" to the game Hollow Knight because it's artstyle was very similar and was a metroid vania like hollow knight, but people soon learnt that it was more than just a hollow knight rip off and was even supported by the creators of hollow knight, team cherry games. Also it's just a demo right now, give them time to flesh it out more and hopefully find it's own personality.

it's when you copy the design of the game

It should have been a celeste modification

eh, I've seen worse rip-offs

just tried a bit of the demo i wanted to see for myself. abhorrent. it's so blatant

Yeah but Germinal is a boy! 🤦‍♂lol As for consequences, I sure hope the gaming community recognizes this and doesn't support Germinal, and goes out of their way to support Celeste even further. Thank you for covering this

I really feel like if you had enough valid points you wouldn't have had to pad the list so much, in a rapid fire of nonsense that just exaggerates the issue. 3 save slots? Tilesites with a dark center and light outside that helps denote collisions? Programmatic squash and stretch? Next you are gonna fault them for having a game title that is just one word.

This whole video is a show of bad faith to wreck up-coming indie devs with baseless accusations through an incredible biased view. Shame on you, really.