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.

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