Celeste

The devs say this game was made with love and passion, all lies. This game was made with pure unadulterated malice and the desire to cause as much pain as possible...10/10 genuinely one of the best gaming experiences of my life, everyone should play it

This game means a lot to me. Best platformer out there, it is very sweet and charming, you should play it. It's the 5G towers I swear.

Not a puzzle game, no rating given. In some ways, I feel like I don't need to review this game, since I would be nowhere near the first to talk about why it's the best platformer ever made. However, to me, it is more than that. This isn't just the best platformer ever made, it's the platformer to end all platformers. Us game designers (me especially, in fact) often feel like we need to reinvent the wheel. This can definitely be a good thing in some cases, however, I'm beginning to learn that there's also value in taking an idea or even an entire game that already exists, and justifying your game as simply learning from its flaws. My favorite game, I Wanna Lockpick, was made like this - the game's idea, a lot of its mechanics, and in that case even some aesthetics and levels, were directly borrowed from I Wanna KeyPick 100, a game I think I would've had a significantly worse time with. Because lockpick was...better in every way, it absolutely dwarfed keypick in popularity, and I and many others played it either instead of keypick or instead of neither. And I think that's great - had LAWatson not wanted to make lockpick out of fear for not reinventing the wheel enough, firstly we wouldn't have gotten the masterpiece that it is, and secondly, the idea would've been left in a much worse state, both not seen by nearly as many people and not enjoyed by nearly as many people who have seen it. I think playing Celeste has made me begin to think of the entire pure platformer genre as one giant example of this. Ever since...whatever the first platformer ever was (idk I'm not a retro gamer lol), minus very gimmicky platformers, every pure platformer ever has just been a one-up of the previous, with different numbers, different sets of mechanics, more features that make them not feel unnecessarily punishing, perhaps deeper movement, etc - all with the same fundamental idea, just trying to develop it further and further. Celeste has, to me, cemented itself as the culmination and conclusion of that massive collaborative effort (...use of so many C words not intended). I'm not exaggerating when I say the numbers are tuned perfectly, and the movement is so deep (in ways I've apparently only scratched the surface of when playing through merely just A-sides 1 through 7) that nothing can compare, especially when you consider how massive the modding community for the game is. Why would anyone make another pure platformer when they can instead make a Celeste mod? And perhaps more importantly, why would I now go back and play earlier pure platformers, or later ones? I waited for this many people to make the window through which I see the idea better, I looked through the window now, and now I don't see a point in looking at the same idea through a worse window. To me, Celeste is now the I Wanna Lockpick to every other pure platformer's I Wanna KeyPick 100. I wouldn't say the game as a whole is flawless - it sometimes likes to rely on cycles/waiting in ways that got on my nerves once or twice in my playthrough, and the story didn't hit very hard for me (although it is a good story) - but the actual platforming part of the game definitely is. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I think this is the last pure platformer that needs to exist.