Preemptive Retaliation

There’s a video on YouTube that serves as a walkthrough for the final level in Celeste. Including cutscenes, it’s forty five minutes long. Not including cutscenes, it’s forty. It’s a long level, a gauntlet, and the final screen takes around a minute and a half of tight, precise platforming to complete.

It took me seven hours. The final screen was over an hour for me.

I remember the exact moment I dropped it a few years back. I was playing on the Switch, stuck at a particularly difficult series of actions required to navigate a spiky maze and a moving block, and I had tried and failed about a hundred times. In an effort to assuage myself that I was making the right movements, that I wasn’t making a huge misjudgement, I looked up that YouTube video to check the solution. It turns out that I did figure it out correctly, but wasn’t quite pulling it off the way I needed to. It was also then that I discovered that I was at the twenty minute mark of the forty minute video. I had already suffered through hours of attempts and mistakes and gruelling challenge to get to that point, and realising that I would have hours more still – more hours of joyless, thankless struggle – well I just decided to pack it in there and then. I had done enough. I had my fun, the game had its fun in its victory over me. End of story.

But this time… this time I persevered. I reached that room that defeated me and with an indistinguishable cocktail of determination and spite, I made it through. I pulled off the required actions and made it to the end of the screen, where another screen met me, and another, and another, until I made my way to the final one. Then, over the course of four days, I chipped away at it. I tried it over and over, and learned its patterns, and fought for every pixel I could get.

It gave me a new appreciation for musicians, who have to play a complex array of notes to a perfect rhythm every single time, to repeat something over and over until it becomes rote, a process in muscle memory beyond thought, relying on feel.

Over four days I made my way through that level, and in my hundreds of attempts, one of them was successful. And that was it! I made it to the end of the final level, I had completed the final challenge. I had beaten the game that had beaten me so long ago.

And now what?

What am I supposed to do now? Go back to other videogames? Just, play another one like nothing? I wonder if this is how Don Quixote felt, knowing that there were no more giants to conquer.

I like my success. I can sit here and think about how I triumphed in the game and what it taught me. No one I am close to has played it themselves, and they cannot comprehend the effort, but I can sit here and be proud of myself. I often wonder to myself about the veracity of digital achievements – how many Minecraft worlds have I built that no one will see? How many challenges have I learned from and overcome? How many connections have I made to non-player characters? – but I can be proud of myself for completing Celeste. I had determination, and grit, and stubbornness, and insanity.

But what now? But what now?