Celeste is a mountain-climbing platformer from the makers of TowerFall
Starring Madeline, actually.
Matt Makes Games founder Matt Thorson is best known for TowerFall: Ascension, a delightful co-op action platformer. Thorson's next game is Celeste, a self-described "hardcore mountain-climbing platformer" that's coming to Steam this month.
Celeste stars Madeline, a young girl hellbent on reaching the summit of Celeste Mountain. To do so, she'll need to clear more than 600 screens of "hardcore platforming challenges and devious secrets," it seems. Celeste is an old-school platformer, after all, with one giant level broken into smaller stages. There are also "B-side" chapters to unlock, which offer yet more challenging stages.
Thorson worked with developer Noel Berry on Celeste. Berry has designed numerous flash games in his time, and also helped Thorson create Celeste Classic, a free flash-based prototype which you can play here. (Pro tip: jump with X and dash with C, and don't forget you can dash upward.)
Although unreleased, Celeste was nominated for Excellence in Audio in this year's Independent Games Festival awards. Its Steam page boasts it will have more than two hours of original music.
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Austin freelanced for PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and has been a full-time writer at PC Gamer's sister publication GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a staff writer is just a cover-up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news, the occasional feature, and as much Genshin Impact as he can get away with.