I beat Celeste for woff and I have feelings. I think it's one of those things where I can see how it would be an amazing game for someone, but I'm just not as into the genre, and there are was minor static that interfered with the messaging, for me.

Like, the selfie guy, and some of the cutesy elements were kind of annoying to me? I know that wasn't the intended effect, but that's how I felt. And the end was fucking brutal. Something that feels like it shouldn't have taken as long as it did. I suspected it was procedural

I think the two things standing in the way of me really liking it instead of appreciating it were genre and my own psychographic. Genre in that masocore platformers are Not My Thing, and psychographic in that I almost never feel meaningful accomplishment from video games.

Celestes_Trick is tying the narrative of overcoming a challenge to the player overcoming it, and I just didn't care about overcoming it myself, so I didn't identify with it mechanically. Some of the dialogue around depression rang true, but it ultimately wasn't for *or* about me