The Patreon Letter - 13th January, 2019

Hey, this letter is like a week and a half late. I'm sorry about that. Sometimes the brains get bad and it becomes hard to do work and we're in the middle of a podcast crunch. Not that that excuses being so late, but I did want to offer it up as a way of explanation. Either way, a new letter from me will be up this coming weekend, as usual!

Hi everyone, Em here again to ring in the new year and riff on some of the ideas of my last letter by talking about one of the most popular games of 2018 and my strange non-reaction to it. That's right, we're talking about Celeste. I assume you already know what Celeste is, but I will probably be spoiling some of the story content, so fair warning if that's something you're sensitive to. 

Celeste feels like a game that was made for me. I love platformers, especially hard ones, I love lush pixel art, I like pretty ambient music. And yet I found myself coming to it very late and even then feeling really disengaged with it. I found myself struggling to get through it, simply in terms of interest level, and wondered frequently to myself 'is the game bad? is it just me?' I finished the game finally two weeks ago, and have spent the time since looking for an answer to that question. 

I don't think the game is bad. I'll admit that when it came out I was very put off by how much of the discussion centered around it as a Powerful Mental Health Statement(tm), as there are so many problems with the mostly dormant subgenre of Empathy Games (if you don't know what this is consider yourself lucky, it was a bad time in indie game scenes five+ years ago). So the pitch being that it was about depression was a big warning sign. I played Hellblade last year. Hard pass.

Also indie platformers aren't what they used to be with me. I remember when Super Meat Boy came out and I got really into that extremely hard subgenre of platformers for a while, but that was a decade ago now. I'm different. I'm not looking for a hard game to sink weeks into, I really want to be finished with any game I play in two weeks and am looking for more casual experiences. Also, hard platformers are a dime a dozen, and for every Flywrench there's like seventy Volgarr the Vikings, games that might be good but that I'm sure never going to play to find out. It's an overstuffed genre, and my bandwidth is low. 

Which all goes to illustrate why I skipped Celeste back when it came out. But I do try to play small games when they're still remembered towards the end of every year so I did grab Celeste and played through it. And for all of my worries about how its genre and subject matter were going to annoy me, I very much was not annoyed while playing it. Instead? I mostly felt nothing.

I think this is mostly a me problem. In some 'objective' part of my awareness I acknowledge that Celeste is good. It looks incredible, the music is solid enough, and it plays incredibly well. I think it veers a little too hard at the end, but also I'm old now and my patience for being stuck isn't what it was when I was trying to 100% Meat Boy a decade ago. But playing it felt like a removal from the experience of taking it in in a way that's really gotten under my skin in the weeks after playing it.

At some point in playing games semi-seriously for so many years, I start to wonder if there's really a point where you can play too many games. I wouldn't say I'm jaded, exactly, but there's definitely a sort of numbness to too much history with a genre that can be really debilitating. I look at Celeste and I see N and Meat Boy and The Passage and Strawberry Cubes and Journey and I just feel ancient. It's hard to really grapple with the honest reality of a game when you're burdened with a checklist of x meets y in your brain because you've just played too many damn games. And that sucks, because it harms my ability to enjoy stuff in the present and the sort of burdensome regard I drop on games like Celeste that shouldn't and can't answer for the history of this subgenre of platformer, no matter what individual aspect I might focus on at any one time.

I don't have a solution to this, but at the very least I'm getting better at noting when it happens. I didn't really connect to much in Celeste, but I really like the hotel music and I think the way the final area is broken up into intense action with moments of peace (I don't want to speak too specifically in case you haven't seen the end sequence) is really thoughtful and exhilarating. But also I'm kind of take it or leave it. I have no fandom around it, you know?

This happened to me with Undertale, too, and that sucked. Celeste is probably a better game than Undertale? Yeah, I think I believe that. 

I'm currently getting rid of a lot of my games, trying to let go of things that languish on a shelf unplayed and absent even from my backlog. Every game I let go of, symbolically closing the door on ever reappraising it, the more freed I feel from the burden of games as a field I've spent so much time and energy investing in. 

I wish I could take away the memories, too, of three decades playing games and having so much crust built around my interfacing with games as objects, so I can remember what it was like when I had six games and getting a new game was a significant increase in the potential I had to explore this genre. 

I want to like games like Celeste, but to do that for me means letting go of the past as much as it does embracing the game before me, and that's an uncharted territory. 

I'm working on it.

I'll be back in a few days with another one of these. Thank you all once again for your infinite patience. 

- Em