I used four nights to pass the first four chapters, then turned on infinite dash and infinite life to pass the others. Even in this situation I still cannot find all the hearts and strawberries.
The game has excellent music. Yet what interests me most is the way it expresses a story and characters.
It seldom has direct story narritation, but all the formation of the character is merged in the environment and in the gameplay. This type of story telling and shaping characters is very novel for me.
Usually to shape a character, the character faces some events from the outside environment, in handling such events the character expresses itself, and the character may grow up in some critical events.
Celeste differs from the common routine in that, using the special setting of the mountain that “reflect the person” there is no events or obstacles from the outside environment. Madeline, the character is facing and chellenging herself, throughtout the whole game. Madeline is not only the character we control, it is also the challenge we face. All her feeling, thoughts, personalities and even growth are shown not only from the dialog and the character, but also the environment {which strictly speaking, is also the character herself}.
But there is one thing that I dislike about the game.
As the game, the fun of playing it mainly come from repeatitive works: dying and retrying at every chapter, and finally the players are satisfied from mastering a series of operation that can pass the chapter. I think this type of hard fun is not suitable for many people, at least me, because it requires, at least, one have enough time to spend on the game through the repeatitive work.
Many people hear the high ranking of the game. After work they download it and play, then found it is too hard to even pass the first chapter. They can only spend perhaps 1 hour on game every day so perhaps they can never pass chapter 3 (for me I spent 4 hours continuouly on it and I think if I play 1 hour everyday I will forget the feeling to pass the sections I learnt from the previous day). This type of fun is only for those with enough time and patience.