I sat down with this for a few short hours last night and cleared up to chapter 3 (and 2300m in Pico-8; couldn't quite get the double jump to click with me well enough to get any further). A few initial thoughts from the little I've seen:
- I highly approve of platformers where you only get to keep your optional challenge collectibles if you escort them out of the danger zone and into a place of safety. I remember thinking back when I played Rayman Legends that this really should be more prevalent, and am a little surprised every time I play games like DKCTF that is masterfully polished in every respect except for how collectibles (there, puzzle pieces) are trivialized by the permission granted the player to suicide into them.
- Like others here have said, what grabbed my attention right away were how many ideas were imported from Super Mario Galaxy. It's likely I would have run into significantly more trouble even in the early chapters if I hadn't cut my teeth on Cosmic Clones in the Chompworks all those years ago.
- I love the thoroughness of the stat tracking, with separate speed records for both stages and perfect clears (not that I've had any perfect clears).
- I'm one of those people having a bit of trouble with aiming the air-dash, already a concern of mine when I heard I would be going into a precision 2D platformer built around the analogue stick. I quickly realized why: whenever my aim is off, in the vast majority of cases it's because I'm still falling into conventional side-scroller habits of using mid-air adjustments to stick my landings or control my position on the X-axis. That's a decades-long habit baked into an experienced player's intuition, but rather necessary to the genre, I think, so your jumps aren't dependent on a purely visual estimate of what your character's normal jumping distance is, and you don't have to guess or figure out a precise jumping-off point by trial and error. So when I take my stick from position 1 (jump direction) to position 2 (mid-air adjustment) to position 3 (dash direction), the problem I'm running into is that my stick position still has "momentum" from position 2 when I hit the dash button. It's clear to me that's an obstacle I'll simply have to remain conscious of and surmount over the course of this specific title.
- For a game like this, where limited inputs are pushed to their limit by stage design, it's best to keep the inputs simple; nevertheless, I thought quite a bit about what kind of input improvements would befit the mechanics, like a direction-locked alternate input for the air dash (a single button for a vertical jump, or an SSB-like C-stick input on the right stick where you "smash" it in one direction, locked to angles separated by 90 or 45 degrees). That's probably overthinking it, given how managing the aerial dash direction is the entire skill ceiling in Celeste apart from the usual perceptual work of reading and reacting to the layouts, and how it already makes considerable accommodations for players of all skill levels, beginner to expert. But I can't shake the nagging feeling that using a single stick in all directions for so many rapid functions at once, at the level of precision this game demands, is either a little conflicted or just unusual.
- On the Switch, thus far I've played with detached Joy-Cons in tabletop and handheld mode, and I'm beginning to think I should try the game with the Joy-Con grip attachment solely to standardize the angle of my hands in relation to the analogue stick. This is one game that makes me wish for an octagonal gate in the hardware.
