The thing about Celeste is that it's essentially two games in one. The first game is when you play it with only the abilities explicitly taught by the game up to that point (for most of the game, just jump, climb, and dash), and the second is when you go back and replay it from the beginning, having learned about wallbounces and hyper dashes and such. The level layouts of the "second game" are all identical to the first, of course, but the traversal becomes completely different with the mobility allowed by these newly-learned moves. (More recently, you could argue a third game has developed around un-taught and unintended tech like ultra dashes and demodashes, but you get the idea.)

But at least for me, the existence of this second game (and third) does not in any way detract from the quality or enjoyability of the first one. The speedrunners are basically playing a different game, and unlike most other video games, in Celeste this is by design.

> un-taught and unintended tech like ultra dashes and demodashes

These are the things I had in mind. It's quite astonishing to see a TAS or even some runners skip straight through an obstacle or jump off of a spike.

I guess I don't understand how it takes away from the casual experience when challenges in a game can be skipped through strategies that you would never even think of in a casual playthrough. Does the existence of a 17:01 world record for Ocarina of Time Any% that skips 95% of the game via a wrong warp make the game not worth playing casually?

It's seems odd to be bothered by knowing someone out there is tremendously better at a game than you are. Whenever I play tennis, I'm aware that my skills are laughably bad compared to even a mediocre pro, but who cares?

Seems unrelated.

Celeste fan and speedrunner of it here.

> You can jump straight through some obstacles, get additional dashes, etc. that the developers didn't originally intend.

Most of these techniques were intended; the game was designed to have them in. The game actually teaches you most of this tech extremely late in the game. It's a replay-ability thing. There's an extremely good talk at GDC a few years back about Celeste level design, incidentally...

There have been a few situations where runners did find an actual glitch, and the devs patched them out, because they weren't intended. There have also been one or two where they've left it in, because it's healthy for the running community overall.

I haven't played much VVVVVVV, but isn't it basically the same as celeste? Or is it Celeste's lack of randomness that makes it worse for you; I thought VVVVVV didn't have any randomness either, but it's been a few years.

> Most of these techniques were intended; the game was designed to have them in.

As another reply reminded me, I'm thinking of stuff like demodashes that definitely weren't intended. In any case, the comment I'm replying to is also criticizing design styles that benefit speedrunners over the average player, so my comment is kind of a reaction to that.

> I haven't played much VVVVVVV, but isn't it basically the same as celeste?

The difference with VVVVVV is that the controls are simple, instead of having runner-friendly combos that get extremely long or involve glitches. The game is played with arrow keys: up / down flip the direction of gravity, and left / right move the player character at a constant speed to the left or right. That's all there is to the controls. Similarly, Super Hexagon has exactly two inputs: left and right, which move an arrow around in a circle.

In contrast, games like Celeste put an enormous amount of complexity behind input combos. The air dash mechanic alone took me hours to learn with any precision. The complaint I have (and maybe the parent comment too) is that as a casual player it's hard to shake the feeling that these games were designed for someone who has a lot more time to train finger memory on a bunch of precise input combinations than you do.

So it's not the existence of speedrunning that bothers me (I watch a bunch of GDQ, actually), it's the experience of playing games that are easy to exploit and "beat" if you have time to practice frame-perfect inputs, but aren't so rewarding casually. As I said in my comment you replied to, I realize this is all very subjective and probably won't bother most people (and I actually, I like Celeste quite a lot). But it's also the reason I find games like Smash very frustrating as a casual.

Input combos? I'd definitely call things like extended hypers and wallbounces input combos, but for the basic air dash, I guess I don't consider pressing 2 buttons at the same time (dash + direction) to be worthy of calling a "combo". By that standard, jumping left/right or climbing up/down are also input combos.

On the other hand, though, I've seen friends of mine who are less experienced with video game controls struggle with all of the above actions. I could watch my friend manipulate the controller and see that she was only able to handle one button input at a time, so for example in order to jump right, she had to break it down into the discrete actions of: hold down the right button, hold down the jump button, release the jump button, release the right button, with maybe half a second to a full second in between each action. So for this friend, pressing any two buttons at the same time clearly was an "input combo" that was a challenge to execute.

The interesting thing to me is that in my mind, the basic controls of Celeste feel very simple: it's "only" run, jump climb, dash (until 7B and 8C teach you wallbounces and hypers). But all of those basic actions have so many subtleties. For example, jumps can also be wall jumps, and there are even two kinds of wall jumps: straight up the wall if you hold climb, which consumes climbing stamina, or away from the wall if you don't hold climb, which doesn't consume stamina (not counting the other wall jump type, neutral wall jumps, since those aren't taught or required to complete the game). Somehow all of this complexity felt very intuitive to me, even at the beginning when I still hadn't learned to execute it all consistently. So I never felt during my first playthrough that Celeste was somehow catering to speedrunners at the expense of the casual experience. In fact, my impression was that Celeste does a very good job of providing the smoothest possible ramp up from casual play to speedrunning.

Anyway, if there's a point to this meandering comment, it's that variation in the way that people perceive the complexity of video game controls is very interesting. The same friend I mentioned above, who had trouble stringing together two inputs in Celeste, can give me a run for my money in Mario Kart, managing steering, mini turbos, and using items all at once.

Gotcha, thanks! Yeah, I was thinking you were talking about stuff like wall bounces and extended hypers; most people that don’t get to the C sides assume they’re unintentional. My bad!

I find Smash difficult too. Wave dash in Celeste? I’ll do it all day. In smash? Dunno, just doesn’t work. Humans are funny :)

> need to get better at the game, not get better at memorizing a precise series of inputs and strategies.

Seriously though, what does this even mean? I love platformers, but strategy and muscle memory pretty much sums up most action oriented games.

Why does the existence of speedrunners playing differently ruin the fun for you? Why sabotage yourself by setting unfun time limit challenges for yourself?

I will never be a chess grandmaster. That doesn't make chess unfun.