Is It Possible to Beat Celeste Without Climbing?

celeste is a game about climbing a mountain but in actuality it's a game about climbing the metaphorical mountain in all of us it's about overcoming fears it's about living with mental illness it's a game about self-identity and reflection but unlike actual actuality is just like like you are straight up like climbing mountains and stuff but you want to know what i've always found kind of weird even though this game's message is all about our main character here supposedly not being a mountain climber this idea just really isn't implemented in the gameplay in any meaningful capacity at least so you know i'm gonna help out celeste's artistic representation by beating the game and reaching the summit without ever actually climbing now what the heck does that mean well my definition of no climbing essentially just boils down to deleting the grab button which will make it so i can't climb or jump up walls there is an in-game no climbing mode that i could also do but turning this on changes some game mechanics in ways that makes the game much easier and in my opinion makes the challenge less interesting so with the rules set in stone and my name changed to something completely innocuous and unassuming it's time to answer the question is it possible to beat celeste without ever climbing [Music] but before we get into anything i just like to mention that the percentage of people who watch my channel that are subscribed is interestingly the same percentage of my audience that's female you know just a little something to think about men anyway we start off in the prologue which may seem innocent but oftentimes tutorial areas like this are where challenges go to die and here we get to see exactly why this is the case we don't have the ability to dash yet so the only two things we really can do here are jump and climb and jumping just doesn't quite cut it of course jumping off of a wall is still an option but since we can't grab getting height out of this just doesn't seem feasible at least not without a little advanced trick up my sleeve a trick that we will come to know as the single most important bit attack in the entire challenge neutral wall jumps see if jumping towards a wall to go up is banned and if jumping away from a wall doesn't get us enough height to clear it then our only option is to jump while holding no direction which while still sending us away from the wall doesn't give us nearly as much horizontal momentum this means that we can do a neutral wall jump immediately start holding the direction towards the wall and then let go of that direction to do another neutral wall jump by chaining these we can effectively climb walls without technically climbing in fact we don't even lose stamina by doing this meaning that we could just go up a wall indefinitely if we really needed to however this isn't just a catch-all not only are neutral wall jumps slow and kind of hard but they also take up much more space than climbing normally meaning that if there were say spikes on the other side of me here they might not be the best idea luckily however this is in fact still the tutorial so we face nothing of the sort for now instead we finish off the prologue with not only the ability to dash finally but also the ability that might just let us complete this challenge [Music] on to our first real level we can see that dashing is yet another invaluable tool in our arsenal it effectively just acts as a double jump that refreshes whenever you land which makes the majority of these rooms trivial even without the ability to climb that is at least until we come across this room this is a conveyor belt platform whose main purpose is to move once you interact with it interacting refers to either landing on the block or you guessed it grabbing onto it and since neither of those are options we're gonna have to find a way to clear this gap without using the block we usually need and this as you can see even with our newfound dash just doesn't seem possible at least not without advanced trick number two baby let's go this is a wave dash and it too will prove to be immensely useful throughout the challenge it works by dashing diagonally down into the ground at which point you're able to jump before the dash actually ends transferring a ton of the dash's speed in the air and if you time the jump properly you can even get your dash refreshed effectively making it a better jump with way more speed and distance at the expense of slightly less height so by wave dashing here i was able to cross this gap and avoid having to use the block altogether and the next room was a pretty similar story however as great as that was it wasn't about to help me much in this room here you're supposed to make this block fall down in order to set up a little platform to stand on and get over these spikes but much like the conveyor blocks these things don't fall unless we grab onto them so we're gonna have to find another way and with not enough space to set up a wave dash i had to settle with this nonsense okay what the heck was that did i just straight up jump off the spikes well kinda if you line yourself up perfectly it's actually possible to wall jump off of this tiny surface in between the spikes which is what gives us the necessary distance to cross this gap and with that room completed all we had left to do was a bunch more neutral wall jumps to get around not being able to use the conveyor blocks in this room and the first chapter was officially completed but man despite getting through on skate that was still kind of a rough level all it takes is a few mechanics that expect you to be able to grab and things can go south pretty quick however these mechanics vary drastically from chapter to chapter so all we can hope is that the next chapter has a little bit of mercy [Music] yeah so chapter 2 is so easy there's one mechanic and it's entirely inconsequential next [Music] now chapter 3 although not quite as dense with tricks as the first as its mechanics didn't really impact the challenge too much still brought things back up to speed simply by upping the base difficulty before we even got into the meat of the level for example i had to get this key by doing a short wall jumping section which although possible is certainly much more difficult when one of the only few options we have of a wall is completely removed luckily i was able to cheese it by switching back and forth between these two rooms to repeatedly refresh my dash in the air which gave me enough height to grab the key without any difficulty aside from that i also started to incorporate advanced trick number three the wall bounce which i use throughout the many vertical sections of this level by cancelling an upwards dash with a wall jump we can effectively bounce off of any wall with a bunch of vertical momentum which makes otherwise brutal obstacles like this which removes neutral wall jumping as an option a little bit more manageable and with this new tool up our sleeve we were able to breeze through this chapter as well with not too much in the way of this challenge we were making fantastic progress so it makes sense it was about time for something to shake things up if chapter three was a step up from the first two chapters then chapter four is like eight steps up and three to the side we've been getting pretty lucky with the last few level mechanics as none of them really challenged our lack of climbing ability however that luck was about to turn on us as this level has not won but two mechanics that just do not sit well with this challenge and we get to see the first almost immediately wind wind is somewhat of a double-edged sword on one hand if there's wind blowing towards a wall then it actually makes it much easier for us to scale it as it sort of helps us mitigate the momentum we get when we're jumping away from the wall however i probably don't have to go too too in depth on why the opposite might be a bigger issue that's right if there's wind blowing away from a wall then that makes the wall straight up impossible to climb this makes a lot of these otherwise fairly simple rooms much harder than they need to be but don't you worry my friends because the second mechanic in this level is somehow even worse than that say hello to the guided blocks yet another type of platform that only does its job as a platform if we can interact with it which will sometimes require grabbing it but nope it doesn't stop there for as we see with our first encounter with one sometimes it's not even enough just to activate the blocks in this case we're expected to grab onto the side of the block in order to guide it left and right which is how we're intended to get up here and continue the level of course without grabbing we'll just have to find a way to get up there without the block and spoiler alert this is going to be a trend for this level luckily getting around this one actually isn't too bad so long as you're a dang wizard all right look i'm not gonna pretend to know how this one works i just know if you brush right underneath the corner and press jump at just the right time you'll be able to jump off the wall even if it's all spiked up and after an extremely kind room with the guided block they were actually allowed to activate and control without grabbing no way we come across this mess oh man that's a lot of up to do dang you know it'd just be really nice to find i don't know maybe just a couple platforms here that i could jump off of get all this height i need man i'm just spitballing you don't worry though eventually i was able to use these crystals in combination with some wall bounces to get all the way over to this wall at which point some precise neutral wall jumps were able to get me to where i needed to be bypassing that complete disaster of a room okay this challenge isn't fun anymore alright let me get this straight game you expect me to go from here to there and i'm not allowed to use this platform uh why why would you make me do that i can't do that who do you think i am i can't even climb it wasn't already obvious just doing a wave dash here doesn't even get close to crossing this gap so we're gonna have to really scratch our heads on what to do here clearly this little area up here is gonna have to come into play in at least some capacity as it might be able to shorten the gap we have to cross a little bit it's not quite that trivial to get up there though since normal wave dashing doesn't get us enough height to let us jump off the walls instead to get the height i needed i had to cancel a normal horizontal dash instead of a downwards diagonal one which doesn't get me as much speed but gives back the height of a normal jump at this point the trick technically isn't a wave dash anymore but instead it's what the celeste community calls a super and although they are definitely different i feel like it's just more confusing than anything to call the different variations of what is essentially the same trick completely different names and let's be real for the purpose of this video would you rather i refer to this as a reverse extended hyper jump or just a different wave dash i don't feel the need to get too too precise with these tricks alright i'm a casual anyway that being said though the initial jump to get up here is honestly the least of our worries for although it isn't terribly difficult to use some wall jumps from here to get into a better position than i could with a wave dash we're still gonna have to somehow get up into here with only a single dash left in our resource bank my first idea was to do a diagonal dash near this corner and then do a corner jump similar to the one earlier in the level however no matter how many times i tried i just couldn't get it to work if you dash too late then madeline will fall too far down to actually get the wall jump but if you dash too early then madeline will be too far to the left and bonk her head on the ceiling losing that height that we need it really yet again seemed hopeless which is why i had to pull out advanced trick number four i think at this point this is a crouch dash functionally it's the exact same as a normal dash except madeleine is crouched a bit making her collision box a tad bit smaller you can do this by first dashing down which puts madeleine in her crouching state and then less than a twentieth of a second later input the direction you actually want to dash tricking the game by pulling the old switcheroo or alternatively you could just do it i didn't bind the crouch dash to a button in the settings but to each their own anyway why am i talking about this well like i said earlier trying to dash early here makes you bonk your head but if we do a crouch dash we can actually sneak right under the ceiling here without that being an issue so from there the dash will end making madeleine stop crouching in the air giving the final necessary height to get a wall jump finally finishing off this room okay geez can we finally be done with the insanity in the level nope absolutely not next room also sucks like i said earlier in this chapter the wind makes some of these walls impossible to scale normally and here we can really feel the effects of that i had two leading theories as to how i could overcome this thing my first idea was to instead go under the wall and then do this insanely precise corner jump in order to finish off the room however although i'm pretty sure that this would have eventually worked i ended up getting my second strat to work before which just involved getting an extremely tight wave dash off of this tiny little platform in order to scale the wall without climbing it oh boy oh boy is that the third god-awful room in a row what a treat for me like last room i can't just climb over this thing because of the wind however unlike last room there doesn't seem to be a way to get over it with any sort of wave dash so under it was and again i resorted to using a crouch dash in order to dock right under these spikes and avoid getting hit in theory anyway oh look this room isn't too bad but don't even get me started on the terrible room number four again the wind is just terrible here and it's getting harder and harder to get around being intended to climb that being said i got past the main obstacle here by doing what must have been a maximum height wall bounce in order to get up here from there i was able to use a wave dash to skip the guided block section and finish off the room but i'm sorry did you really think that there wasn't about to be a garbage room number five i again had to deal with guided blocks in this room and although the first section here wasn't too bad this area yet again took some precise wall jumping in order to get through without needing this guy yeah this is the sixth one and you know what after all that i think that with this room the game has finally hit us with its killing blow cause this room is an absolute nightmare and like a hundred percent impossible for sure for sure again not being able to activate this guided block is really ruining my life here and getting through without it is way way less trivial than the last couple rooms trust me all right i did my research here and even tassers of this game have trouble finding a way past here and that's both with climbing and extra speed generated from you guessed it activating the block so is that really it then well kinda but also kinda not really one thing you can do is use that no climbing mode that i mentioned at the very beginning of the video this still makes it so you can't grab but it also lets you activate blocks like this just by touching them although this does make the room possible without climbing for the sake of the challenge i'm only going to turn it on when i feel like it's absolutely needed after all it does make a lot of the challenge much more interesting to keep it off don't worry though i'll still keep track of how many times i have to do it for those of you who want to be mean and consider this cheating and with all that said and done i turned the mode back off and it was finally time to finish off this level and to do so all it took was a couple rooms of fighting off some intense wind and although wave dashes here are absolutely necessary in order to get past most of the rooms there wasn't really anything that stood out as particularly challenging so with that we were finally free from the golden ridge and we could take a bit of a breather [Music] chapter 5 is the mirror temple and compared to the absolute terror that was the last level this one really isn't too bad this chapter's primary mechanic involves these guys the dashing platforms which move whenever we dash which is great because that's something we're actually allowed to do is what i would say if a bunch of the rooms here weren't designed around obstacles like this like wind clinging onto moving platforms is a two-way street the platform is either moving towards us which makes it really easy to stay with it or it's moving away making it straight up impossible so the only way past rooms like this is to find a way onto the other side of the platform which given rooms like this nonsense can be way too difficult let me run down the list of reasons as to why this room is absolute garbage remember we gotta get to the other side of this thing in order to finish the room without climbing there's just no other way but because this platform is activated by dashing trying to go over it makes us miss the bus by a mile and going under it has its own whole set of complications like see this dash here that's necessary if you don't do that then madeline bonks her massive head on the way over and makes the dash under impossible speaking of this dash you might be thinking that a crouch dash is the way to go because you know the whole massive head thing but nope you actually don't want to be crouching here you actually want madeline to be poking your head up in order to avoid accidentally juking your own ride oh but don't worry cause even if you do all that right here's what's going to happen 95 percent of the time this dash actually works yeah since the platform gets activated by the dash the only thing that doing everything right does is put you in the prime position to get launched into the death zone at mach 3 but whatever it's fine because if you do everything perfect and then just time to last jump a little bit later then it is in fact possible as is everything with enough commitment hard work and pure skill anyway that was the main obstacle of this chapter especially since you can do a wonky wave dash here to skip a good chunk of it overall despite the minor hiccup this place really didn't pose too too many issues oh well ain't this a tree the last section of this chapter requires that we carry this dude around which requires the grab button and unlike our last conundrum the no climbing mode doesn't change anything here so is this really really it then is this where we finally crack for good in this challenge what no what are you talking about this isn't climbing look i get it at this point my rules for this video are all over the dang place but saying that using the grab button to carry around theo here should count as climbing not only sounds dumb but it is dumb and it makes the entire challenge dumb let's think about it for a second if this counted as climbing then for the sake of the challenge i'd want to minimize the number of times i'd press the grab button right sure it sounds reasonable like any other challenge until you realize that you only need to press it once and from there all you need to do is hold it down for the entire section crouching whenever you want to drop them already this is getting weird but we can do better because that last level required us to grab at least outside of the no climbing mode solution so instead of this being two separate instances of grabbing we can just start grabbing in chapter four and keep holding the button down for the entirety of these two levels in fact why stop there why ever let go why risk potentially having to press the grab button again when we can just keep holding it until we beat the whole game and you know what let's go further why do all the hard stuff in the beginning when you can just start holding the dang grab button before the game even starts and then just beat the game freaking normally with one insanely long continuous button press that lasts the entire challenge look at the end of the day i make these challenges because they're a cool and interactive way to show off neat tricks you can do in a video game so the rules although certainly designed to make the challenge possible are primarily there just to make things interesting so for your sake and my own this believe it or not does not count as climbing and my rules will not be discussed any further in my comment section we're moving on [Music] and luckily for us moving on is actually quite easy as chapter six has very little in the way of this challenge for whatever reason the only spot that gave me a little bit of stress was this area right here which really didn't want us doing neutral wall jumps but for some odd reason this level is like the only one in the entire game with branching pads in it so i could just leave and do something else outside of that and our final upgrade with a brand new second dash nothing else important happened making it finally time to tackle the summit [Music] dang it okay so like almost immediately there's a massive issue here you already know who it is nordvpn coming to ruin all my challenges as usual there's no way past this section outside of moving this guy and if you remember from the first level that's not exactly something i can just do on command and yeah there's nothing else i can really even try here the game's just forcing my hand at this point making it the second time the no climbing mode comes to my rescue and although that certainly seemed like a terrible sign for the future of this level the game kindly used the next few big sections here to allow that omen to marinate for a little while longer although there were a couple rooms here and there that required a little bit of work around there really wasn't too much we haven't already seen before there was of course until our karma could finally come to fruition in the form of this room right here now unlike the other very difficult rooms that we've seen thus far in the challenge i'm not actually going to run through all the bad things about this room and the reason to be honest is because it takes longer to explain than it did to actually do which if you were wondering was about give or take three hours so instead i'm just gonna walk through what did eventually work and hopefully that will speak for itself first part's easy peasy you don't even have to think it's not until here where your choices actually start to matter see if you look ahead there's another one of those blocks that we gotta get onto the other side of in order to bypass so after i dash up here i have to go up this wall insanely fast in order to ensure that i don't miss my ride to do that i went ahead and did two of the most frame perfect neutral wall jumps you've ever seen before starting to line up this crouch dash to get over the block now pay attention because this part's also frame perfect you need to crouch dash in order to get in between these spikes and the block but once that dash ends you'll un-crouch an insta-dot so what you need to do is time the dash perfectly so that madeline's feet are on the block after the dash at which point you can continue to hold down to stay crouched and not die oh also you've gotta hold left to also not die to these spikes which you'll probably do anyway once the hard part's done all you gotta do is have 10 frame reaction time to dash out before dying dude who do you think i am i don't got that oh and then you just gotta you know beat the rest of the room here's a light sensitivity warning cause i'm about to show you what about a thousand deaths looks like at a billion percent speed or something like that you know i'm not unfamiliar with tassing i could have just straight up cheated here and no one would have to know but too bad here they are the consequences of my actions okay so no one tell the light sensitive people they all still have their eyes closed so we're just we're just gonna not tell them to open or we're gonna prank them anyway you'd think after that entire ordeal that whatever negative juju i built up for myself would have been paid off by now but nope we still got like eight more stupid rooms luckily though beyond a few sections that weren't too different from things we've already had to deal with there was really only one area that truly gave me a run for my money which conveniently was like the last section in the game this little stretch of wall is only possible by either climbing or using an extra dash so all we had to do here to get that extra dash was to stall for a bit and grab this crystal which really wasn't too bad and with that all we have left are a few more jumps and a few more dashes before we finally make it to the summit of celeste mountain without ever actually climbing but uh we're not done yet i mean sure you could say we beat the game by the most minimal definition possible but can we really say that we're done when we still have an entire extra chapter to do [Music] now core is immediately different from every other chapter we've done so far because we're not even tall enough to ride yet we need four crystal hearts in order to even start the level and i'm sure you've noticed but i haven't been paying any attention to the collectibles we can get crystal hearts by either finding them within the chapters we've already completed or by beating b-sides which are more difficult remixes of all the chapters that we can unlock by collecting cassette tapes within the levels so i guess it's time we start searching and we're off to a terrible start in chapter one we can't get the heart nor the tape as both are blocked off by this massive wall sure we could switch on cheater mode to bypass it but i said i'd only resort to that if the situation was dire and we still do have options left for us for example chapter 2 continues to prove itself as the easiest level by giving us immediate access to the heart and a similarly easy path to the tape however upon actually trying the level that the tape unlocked i realized that i maybe shouldn't be too optimistic about getting hearts from these things it only took a few rooms before coming across a section that i'm pretty sure is impossible i mean these are supposed to be harder than the actual levels so slap them on an already hard challenge and you probably won't be feeling too good don't worry though we still got the rest of the levels to come through that being said though the heart in chapter 3 was actually a little bit finicky it requires us to backtrack through a few rooms and my first go-edit made it look far from possible however interestingly you can choose the order in which you do these three sections and depending on that order the sections will either be easier or harder so if you do this specific area first before any others then there will actually be an extra platform in this room as you backtrack that makes it barely possible giving us our second heart the heart from the b-side on the other hand yeah maybe not quite as much chapter 4's heart and tape were very simple to collect and surprisingly actually the chapter 4b side is super impossible i don't know what you expected luckily though we were able to collect our fourth and final required heart in chapter 5 without too much trouble and although it was entirely unnecessary i went ahead and took a look at its b-side as well just to have a bit of a hearty laugh absolutely not but with that we finally have what we need to begin the final chapter and oh boy what a finale this will be the core has two main gimmicks one is the hot and cold switch which will change certain objects throughout the rooms to have different properties and while playing i quickly developed a burning hatred towards the hot variation cold is great there are a bunch of things you can bounce off of to get height and there are even some walls that you can't even grab if you wanted to heck sometimes i'd even opt to roll with the cold zone even when it was clearly unintended heat on the other hand is hot and spicy and painful and has these two things which both sometimes expect us to grab them in order to gain height off of them oh what's that you want to hear about the second main gimmick of core well remember the entire rest of the game where you're allowed to like you know dash and stuff not in core unless you can provide the crystals you got two of them per room that's the best i can manage this made a lot of obstacles more puzzles than anything yeah some things were still insane mechanically but having to now manage our resources more creatively on top of that added an extra layer to the challenge now i could explain plenty of these rooms in depth about how i had to preserve dashes with precise wall jumps and spike jumps or by preserving momentum through crystals or by stalling out crystals under a tight time limit but nah instead of any of those you know cool or technical rooms i'm gonna take a minute here to discuss my least favorite hours of my godforsaken life look i understand this isn't flashy or anything but you have to understand how hard it is to get over these spikes with neutral wall jumps okay it's the most frustrating thing of all time and you got to do it like four times in this room while also dodging the flame balls and yeah this took longer than that one room and summit but with enough perseverance dedication and a reasonable amount of regret for my decisions we finally made it to the core of celeste mountain and with one final dash we can officially say that we've climbed this mountain of a challenge without actually having to climb it [Music] oh what that yeah don't don't worry about that it's not that's not even a real level if you don't think about it anyway welcome to the end of the video that's right we're done not looking back not even a little bit i know this was a long time coming but i hope it didn't disappoint and hey if it didn't let me know by doing all those youtube things you know like i don't know whatever they are these days i'm working on being more consistent with my uploads as is you know every youtuber with an inconsistent upload schedule but i'm serious i got stuff in the works so expect some more gaming content in the next couple weeks hopefully but for now yeah i'm gone

Channel: Sample

Views: 1,472,264

Keywords:

Id: Q4_k-IX3k4M

Length: 26min 41sec (1601 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022