Four Island

Back in 2018, I was really into Celeste. It was pretty decidedly my favorite game at the time; the gameplay is fun, the music and art are beautiful, and the depiction of mental health issues was very striking. I highly recommend it, in case you've somehow made it this long without playing it.

One of the things that I got pretty invested in was the Golden Strawberries. Once you get far enough into the postgame, you unlock a special golden strawberry at the beginning of each stage, which you have to escort to the end without dying. In the past, I've tended not to enjoy deathless challenges because they felt like pointless difficulty padding, but there was something about Celeste that made it feel achievable, like you'd be able to get there if you just practiced hard enough.

There were 24 levels in the game at that point, and I made it my goal to get all 24 golden strawberries. I wrote about my progress as I went, and posted little video clips when I could. One of my favorite moments in this was practicing 6-a while sitting on the sofa at the office on my lunch break, and then suddenly realizing I was almost at the end. I can still remember the befuddled face my coworker made at me when I collected the berry. I managed to conquer all of the A-sides, all of the C-sides, and the first four B-sides, which meant my next task was 5-b.

So, a little time has passed. Seven years, in fact. Trying to get the 5-b golden strawberry proved too difficult for me back in 2018. The cycles and the spinners and the Theo section are all pretty intimidating. I even learned the spike jump skip in the second checkpoint so I could skip a room, but I still barely made it into the third checkpoint most of the time. I gave up on it eventually, and took a long break from Celeste.

Fast forward to late 2023. The Talos Principle 2 had just come out, and I was excited to play it since I'd enjoyed the first one and even speedran it for a little while. Unfortunately, after waiting a few hours for 70gb of game files to download onto my computer, I opened the game and immediately got vestibular sickness from the graphics. No amount of tweaking settings or upgrading/downgrading my graphics card seemed to help. It's a shame -- I still haven't played it. That experience with Talos 2 seemed to trigger something in me, too; for a few weeks after that, I struggled to play any 3D game. At the time, I thought it was because of a tooth infection, but it's possible that was unrelated.

Either way, it was around then that I noticed an online friend playing modded Celeste levels. It reminded me how fun that game was, and made me wonder whether I'd be able to play it without feeling sick since it was 2D and not 3D. And it turned out, I could! I played through the main game again from the start and it was a lot of fun to get to experience it all again after so long. Then, I downloaded the Strawberry Jam Collab mod and started playing it with my friend.¹ It was so much fun! It really reinvigorated my love for this game, and I think it's safely back in place as my second favorite game ever (behind The Witness).

Anyway, that was a year and a half ago. I still play Celeste a fair amount. I'll just play random levels on my Switch when I'm bored, or I'll replay Strawberry Jam levels or other modded levels that I like. I actually speedran it a few times too, and recently got a 46:41 Any%, which is almost 5 minutes faster than my previous best from 2024 and I'm pretty happy about it.

All this is to say that I've slowly been getting better at the game than I was in 2018. In fact, I'm pretty sure one of the main things that helped me save time in that Any% run is that I died way less often in the later levels. This got me thinking about what else in the game might benefit from me being better able to avoid death. And just a few days ago it occurred to me that maybe I'd gotten good enough to be able to defeat the beast, to beat the level that had bested me: 5-b.

5-b isn't the longest level, but it's not the shortest level either. There's four checkpoints, each with ~5 screens. The first checkpoint is pretty trivial, and I could consistently get through it in like 20 seconds.

Checkpoint 2 is a bit weirder and is one of the few nonlinear sections in the entire game, which is to say that there's two keys you can get in either order. Doing the spike jump I mentioned earlier allows you to skip one of these two rooms, but I eventually decided that the room I was skipping was actually easier than the spike jump. It's possible that my insistence on using that trick is part of why I wasn't able to get the berry before. There's one room in this checkpoint in particular though that is quite nasty and is what killed the majority of my runs: the last room. It's a vertical room filled with throwing stars moving back and forth on a cycle, and as is usually the case with cycle-based gameplay, if you start the room at a bad point in the cycle, you're often screwed. There's also a scary dash between spikes at the end.

Checkpoint 3 starts with another vertical room where you jump and dash between spikes, and it also killed me a lot back in 2018, but there's at least no cycles, and I'm a lot better at it now. After that room, though, almost every room has at least one Seeker in it, which is pretty scary since they can be somewhat unpredictable. The worst is this one:

This room is the farthest I ever got in 2018. There's three breakable blocks suspended over a pit (one of them in the picture is already broken). You have to cling to one, wait for the Seeker to attack, jump out of the way so it breaks the block, land on its head so you get your dash back, and then dash to the next one. Then you do it two more times. If you land on the Seeker before it breaks the block, it's possible that its respawn animation destroys the block anyway. It's pretty spooky to have to get so up close and personal with a Seeker, especially when the AI (sorry for the loaded term) decides it doesn't want to dash at you and is just going to repeatedly amble up to you without breaking the block.

Finally, there's the Theo section. This part was also spooky in 5-a, since you have to make sure Theo doesn't die, and you're also more vulnerable while you're carrying this big crystal around. There's a couple of long rooms with Seekers in them and those are pretty rough. Strangely, though, I ended up finding this checkpoint easier than the middle two. I only made it here three or four times, and that was all it took. The last room is the cassette blocks room, though, and you still have Theo, which adds an extra element of difficulty to these already tricky rooms.

However, as is obvious from the existence of this post, just a few minutes before midnight last night, I did in fact finally get the 5-b golden strawberry! It was actually the first time I'd ever made it to the cassette blocks room with the berry, and I'm very glad I didn't choke. I have my usual 30 second Switch video showing the end, and you can see how close I came to falling into a pit right before the end. But I did it!

It feels great to have finally done what 2018 me couldn't do (and I'm trying not to have an existential crisis about the fact that I'm making progress on a video game challenge I started SEVEN YEARS ago). The question now, however, is: what's next?

Back when I started this, there were 200 strawberries, including 25 goldens. The Farewell DLC released in 2019 brought this up to 202 strawberries with 26 goldens. I've already gotten the Moon Berry in Farewell, so my current total is 198 (175 red, 22 gold, 1 moon). And despite how long this berry took me, it's absolutely not the hardest. 6-b is pretty daunting to me because I am not good at the feather mechanic. 7-b is the longest B-side, and the length of the level almost matters more than the difficulty when it comes to goldens. 8-b sucks; I've never had a good time playing it, and the thought of it fills me with dread. And then there's Farewell.

The Farewell golden berry (or, FWG) is considered the hardest challenge the game has to offer, by a large margin. Farewell itself is quite a step up in difficulty from the rest of the game, and to make things worse, it is 94 screens long.² That being said, I love it. Farewell is my favorite level in the game. I've played it so many times and I've gotten pretty good at it. I've beaten it in under 24 minutes, and with only 22 deaths.

There was actually a period of time last year when I was practicing FWG, despite not returning to the overall golden strawberry challenge. It's a truly magnificent foe. There are so many rooms with so many possible tricks and strats, and for the most part I enjoy making my way through them over and over again. The furthest I got was about 45% of the way through, which I'm still immensely proud of. I have kind of a deranged image detailing my thoughts about the rooms:

Of note is the "power source skip" mentioned near the beginning. I may have been doing the same thing that I was doing with 5-b, where I was attempting a risky trick instead of doing a couple more rooms that aren't actually that difficult. The more runs that get past that point, the better!

Will I ever get FWG? It's a long shot, but maybe! I certainly don't think it's impossible. And will I continue with the B-sides and get 6-b, 7-b, and 8-b? We'll just have to wait and see! Anyway, this has been a little trip down Celeste memory lane, combined with my usual dosage of "look at cool thing I did in viddy game!" See you next time!

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1. Embarrassingly, I googled "strawberry jam" when trying to find a link for this post, and the results were not about the mod. ↩

2. 7-A, the second longest level, has about 60ish screens you go through before the final checkpoint, and then that contains 30 flags marking your progress throughout like six rooms. Keep in mind that these rooms are also much easier than even the beginning of Farewell. ↩