Scrolleste

by Warspyking, Meep and RubyRed.

Before starting this Free Game of the Week project, I had no idea how popular Celeste Classic modding was. Turns out: it’s a big deal! This one, Scrolleste, went live yesterday. Since then, there are already two more – including Backwards Celeste, which makes Madeline walk backwards.

It turns out there are pages and pages and pages of things like this on the Pico-8 BBS, and there’s a lot of super interesting stuff to find out there if you dig into it. Some people redo the graphics, some people try weird experiments, some people even make whole new games.

Scrolleste falls into the “weird experiments” category, and I think it’s super cool. It basically just makes the following two changes to the original game:

1: All of the levels are stitched together into one continuous level.

2. There’s a rising lava floor.

This is a game for the most hardcore of hardcore Celeste Classic fans – it does feature a difficulty selector in the menu, but it sort of doesn’t matter? The baseline difficulty requires you to be good enough to complete the original game with zero deaths. It’s way beyond what I can do, but I still think it’s really interesting.

There’s a games-as-art question that does the rounds on twitter occasionally – if you have a concept like this, where most people aren’t even going to be able to play it anyway, does it even matter that the thing exists? Maybe the “idea” of the thing is the important part of the experience? Idk. Anyway, here’s a video of this being completed on expert difficulty:

[Play in Browser (lexaloffle bbs)]