Why Does Celeste Make Us Feel Anxious? 

All I ever wanted was to post links to my patreon on the internet, support my dream for just $1 a month. Plz. :www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames DaE think this guy sounds like *INSERT ENGLISH MALE HERE* maybe their tweets are the same too: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot

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

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

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

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?"

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

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!

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.

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

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

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 !

"Because all his games are so damn happy: *Super Paper Mario* : "Ima gonna stop you right there"

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

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

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

Another emotional game about climbing a mountain: Journey

"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.

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?

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.

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

The first time i got something like this was in the final confrontation in Rayman advance, where dark Rayman chases you through the level. God i can remember the tension i felt back then even now.

For the entire video I thought you were Mark Brown until I saw the profile picture below the video again when it was over.

"OMG I can't believe he won't mention Dark So.... oh"

This makes me even sadder that I can't play platformers thanks to my disabilities. (I can't make my hands work together well enough to handle jumps and the like)

I just got Celeste physical edition for the switch a week ago. This couldn't've come out at a better time

I just re-watched some of your old videos today and you pick today for a new one. Great timing 👍😁

I'm really excited for this trend of examining and appreciating the different emotions that games can provide that go beyond "fun".

RIP Adam Long Live Alien Adam (The vids are still good so I’m cool with it)

The more I hear about Celeste, the more I learn about it. At first, I passed on it, but now I think I should get it one day.

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.

This channel is amazing. You should do a video on games Redesigning Death, or on Adaptive Soundtracks, that would be so original and new and never done before.

A short hike was an amazing experience. Great ending sequence too

*Reads video title* Great I'm already anxious...

It's quite good to see how much broad set of emotions video games can deliver nowadays! Thanks for the vid!

4:55 Everyone calls her Badeline. XD

Hot take, Celeste is actually a horror game

The stretched image of Super Mario Bros 3 at the beginning made me a bit anxious

When he skipped over Plague Knight when talking about how fun the Shovel Knight characters are. I felt that 😔

Glad to see more videos on my favourite game ❤️

13:21 Oh no! This hurt just watching it! Shout out suggestion : Daryl talks game, Razbuten or Gamedenker, who are three great small channel about video game stuff :D

"his (mario) games are just so damn happy" Mario party : **nervous sweating**

Honestly, I’ve recently been playing Fallout 4 survival mode, with an even tougher mod for it. Winning any fight felt like such an uphill battle. It’s honestly amazing.

What an interesting take on how emotions and videogames tangle up together.

Celeste never really made me feel anxious, it was sanely challenging. Not with negative emotions, not with fake progression system, it was really difficult but the game constantly push you to think "yes this is hard but don't worry, you can make it". In the end the game taught me that I could face any difficulty, I just needed to stay calm and to know when to take a break. It acted like a sort of meditation on me

This vid showed up as the first vid on my RU-vid recommendations while I was trying to find music to calm me down while I was crying from too much stresss! The absolute worst timing for thst showing make me laugh! So thanks haha!

As a new vidgame player whos intimidated by classic games, it made me happy when i saw A Short Hike. Finishing it made me want to actually try more platformer games

this got me out of bed, thanks bro

Getting over it gets fun when you get the hang of the controls, trying to beat it fast is pretty fun, especially when you nail a swing or consequitive swings

Shoutout to Alex Deloach. I've heard that name so many times now, but I still wouldn't be able to spell it from memory.

2:14 "If it's not fun, why bother?" - Reggie Fils-Aimé

im not convinced about the doppelganger. i'm watching you.

I love when a game makes me say "Ugh" Then burst out laughing at my own terrible gameplay.

Watching this video just gave me PTSD of all the b and c versions of the levels....thanks!

Man, I'm in the B-Side of Mirror Temple, and I took a break from it. But whenever I think of going back to it I feel anxious.

"Horror makes you scared" Oh my god really? I never noticed!

My favourit Moment was when I thought I will never get through that and did it on the first try!

Spec ops the line, Space beast terror fright, rain world, all focus on stress and helplessness.

You must love Cave Johnson from Portal, your humor is so similar, I love it. That bit about you having been replaced by an alien could have been Cave talking.

I feel like I've already seen 10 different versions of this same video made by different channels. Wait okay the stuff that's not about Celeste was more original.

dude you and todd in the shadows are the two critical analysts that i like the most nowadays and basically catch my only two interests nowadays aswell i love your content keep it up

for me i felt anxious at first but literally only on the tutorial. the rest of the game i felt just happy

*Retro and Platformer games have a certain charm to them* Game Designers who understand the identity of their game and implement interesting ideas will result in a worthwhile game that will be remembered

Love you videos man thanks

Death Frost Doom is my favorite game about climbing a mountain.

11:00 This is also experienced in Terraria both in movement and other properties (mining, building, design, fighting, etc.). You start weak and slow to feel like a god with endgame stuff.

RU-vid sensed, that I was about to go to bed, and immediately notified me about this video.

Man I love these

I would love to see what you think about pathologic! Seems like a game with all these emotions all at once

13:22 this hurts

I don't remember the jumping on fish part of Celeste. Maybe that was on the extra runs I didn't finish those, my fingers already hurt from A Side.

A short hike sounds similar to the experience of progressing through Death Stranding. At first it's a struggle to navigate, but by mid game that's changed drastically and become a really fun and empowering journey.

"mario's moveset" *shows luigi gameplay*

15:15 Yes! Climbing is really good. Anyone who's has tried it will understand :D

Everybody chillin till you get to the Cotton Alley Dark World

Thanks !!

I was playing getting over it, at the bucket part, about to finish the game... And then a bug caused my save file to dissapear and had me starting from the very beginning. You can imagine my frustration after that happened

1:47 you wanna talk about a chaotic sense of momentum? We’ll plague knight is were it’s at

I just love this game. I’ll listen to anything you have to say about it

Thanks for mentioning A Short Hike.

I really enjoyed Celeste, but this was the first time I've heard of A Short Hike. Looks super interesting, I definitely plan to give it a try sometime

Long difficult sections without rest are super anxiety inducing- ever gone through path of pain in Hollow Knight? By the end I was shaking like mad, I realized after each section that I had held by breath pretty much the entire time

I love that you skipped over plague knight when talking about the shovel knight games

Anyone would be anxious after dying for the 3 thousandth time on a save trying to get the c sides done

*"[...] who I'm gonna call Badeline."* You make it sound like you came up with that. Everybody has been calling her that online since the week the game was released (I was active on the Celeste subreddit back in the day).

*sees title* Wait... What? Maybe it's because i consider the instant respawns a safety net themeselves, but aside from one b-side stage, I've never felt anxiety throughout Celeste, the quick and close-by respawns made it very easy to accept failure and the controls are ridiculously tight. Now, hollow knight on the other end, with its minutes-long boss battles and the dreaded path of pain... That's anxiety.

Does anyone know what game is shown at 2:50? I like strategy games and the graphics look clean and simple.

My entire experience in Celeste was just irritation or outright frustration at the game. Controls are hard to master (the amount of times I've rushed in the wrong direction because the stick was not perfectly diagonal is absurd), but they are even harder to understand. Celeste was a huge safety net for you to recover from mistakes in form of Climb ability, but it doesn't give you any time to use that safety net. My "oh ****" moments, when I have only just realised I've made a mistake and was about to die, happened right when I already died. I've never felt anxious in this game, death is so common that it's just a setback, and an annoying one. Earlier stages felt like button mashing untill I find that perfect password to finish the level. But later ones, starting at the hotel, felt just pure random. I have no time to think and to try to avoid those blobs, just because I am already dead. All of these are reasons I did not have any good time in Celeste. Yesterday, after another set of deaths, I decided just to pick something else, so I've played Hyper Light Drifter for about 20 mins. Those 20 minutes felt better than my entire in Celeste. Basically, Celeste is absolutely not for me, and I do not understand why so many people loved it, I just don't.

Climbing mountaigns=optimal story :3

"A Short Hike" is the best game

Love the video but one comment on mario anxiety, piano

11:20 Piano players: I am four parallel universes ahead of you

My favorite subject

Octo Expansion gives me a feeling of dread for some reason, especially the deapsea metro and some is the music is just depressing like 8 regret

New Super Mario Bros. Wii makes me feel anxious with no relief because there is a constant threat of losing powerups and getting stuck as small Mario and getting only mushrooms from ? blocks. It forces me to play as carefully as possible in order to keep the Fire Flower, Propeller, or Penguin Suit. The Toad houses that have rewards give you only one attempt for the entire game and always have the threat of getting nothing.

Adam sais Mario is happy. *MARIO AND LUIGI PARTNERS IN TIME WATCHES YOU FROM THE DARK WHEN YOU SAY THAT*

@9:40 Can somebody tell me what this game is? Please add titles to games so we can look them up if they look interesting

The outtro makes you seem very much like Wheatley from Portal2

So in conclusion, to make a good game just have it about scaling a mountain in some way, shape or form.

When you play games for the feeling of sheer terror

Benz games is why I am no longer living in my old flat and why said flat has a few holes