Whenever players played any game, seeing hundreds or thousands of deaths would leave them discouraged and helplessly quitting.
But in Celeste, death was not death—it became a simple part of the process.
Here, you were not someone who kept failing.
It was simply like feeling your way across a river on stepping stones. Anyone could head in the wrong direction, but as long as they did not remain forever in the wrong place, every step had meaning.
In the game, when you died, the BGM did not rewind and start over.
Players joked, "This is the first time I've felt the old thief's tenderness. It's also the first game where I can die happily and start over happily."
This trial-and-error approach to death was exceptionally gentle.
Whenever they saw their death count at the end of a level, they could not help laughing out loud and happily continuing onward.
If the early levels still made people want to smash their keyboards, then by Chapters Six and Seven, that urge had quietly vanished!
Before this, players simply could not imagine that in a platformer, an entirely separate level could exist solely to tell a story.
On a starlit night, Madeline sat beside a campfire. She believed that cruel, delusional dark side of herself, so full of controlling desires, was a part of her that she should and had to let go of.
She thought that as long as that side left her forever, she would "get better."
But to that dark-side little girl with violet-red eyes, it looked like Madeline wanted to abandon her!
That enraged her. She would never accept abandonment!
The dark-side girl became huge and terrifying, her purple hair nearly suffocating Madeline.
At that point, the protagonist had reached the temple at an altitude of 2,500 meters, but