Published 28 Jan, 2021
Celeste is a glorious precision platformer, but it began life as a PICO-8 prototype you could play in your browser. To celebrate the full game s 3rd anniversary, its developers took three days to make a sequel to that original prototype. Celeste 2: Lani s Trek can be played now over on Itch.io.
It s again a game about climbing a mountain, but this time you ve got a grapple hook rather than an air dash. It still lets you move laterally and cling to vertical surfaces, but it s a lot trickier to use it to climb.
Noel Berry, one of the game s developers, said on Twitter that it took 3 days to make, which sounds impressive to me, who will take 3 days to get past the game s second level.
Celeste. Maddy Thorson of Extremely OK Games announced
Celeste Classic 2. It’s a free-to-play Pico-8 game everyone can access and play.
Celeste 2: Lani’s Trek stars a whole new character climbing the mountain. As a Pico-8 game, the color palette and screen size are restricted, but all of the adventure’s elements are there. For example, you’ll pass a familiar cabin as Lani begins to climb. However, things don’t go exactly as you might have remembered in the original game. Lani falls into a pit while crossing a dilapidated bridge, acquiring a grappling hook and adding a new challenge to scaling the mountain. Also, as you might imagine, there are still strawberries to find and collect as you climb.
Celeste received a surprise sequel of sorts yesterday called
Celeste 2: Lani’s Trek. It’s not a sequel to the modern version of the game most players know of that was released on the last generation of consoles, but one that follows up on
Celeste Classic.
Celeste Classic and
Celeste 2: Lani’s Trek were made in PICO-8, a “fantasy console” game engine. It’s similar to a regular game console, but without inconvenient hardware. PICO-8 has every aspect that comes with developing games for consoles, including machine specifications, display formats, tools, design culture, and more.
While it may seem like just a game emulator, PICO-8’s ecosystem was all designed from scratch in order to give its games its own identity and sense of authenticity. Additionally, PICO-8 distributes programs made under its platform on .png images that look like cartridges instead of actual physical cartridges.
The original Celeste just got a free sequel
Before Celeste graced our screens back in 2018, we had, uh, Celeste. It was a simplified version of the game created with the Pico-8 engine and released in 2016. It features all the air-dashing, strawberry gathering, and demand for perfect platforming you would recognise, but was more dialled back in animation and these days feels like a proof of concept. Naturally, though, having games with the same name is confusing, so the older of the two became known as Celeste Classic – phew.
Now, though, to celebrate the third anniversary of Celeste, the team at Extremely OK Games has released a follow-up to Celeste Classic. It’s called Celeste 2: Lani’s Trek and the team put it together in just three days.