Video games can be a very strange source of
stress relief. Sitting down to relax with a game is sometimes
a source of mental anguish itself, but despite that they’re still helpful in alleviating
the daily stress of adult life. Over the past month, this has been Celeste
for me - a brutal, frustrating platformer that I completely adore. You play as Madeline, who has set out to climb
to the peak of Mount Celeste and along her journey encounters her own anxieties and self-doubt
- literally, in the form of a dark doppelgänger. You experience Madeline’s struggle in climbing
the mountain through the challenging platforming, but the theme of anxiety is also explored
in perhaps a less obvious way: the music. Composer Lena Raine has put so much of herself
and her own personal struggle with anxiety into the soundtrack in order to tell Celeste’s
story through its music. We know that music can have a physiological
effect on our body’s stress levels, even while playing games. A study from 2004 got people to play a round
Quake III Arena and then measured their levels of Cortisol - a hormone released in response
to stress. Half the participants played with the game’s
heavy, big-beat techno soundtrack, and the other half played without the music. While both groups performed similarly in-game,
Cortisol levels were significantly higher in those who played with the music, suggesting
that they experienced a higher level of stress. While one study proves nothing on its own,
these results are in line with many other studies that have observed a link between
music and stress, though most focus is on lowering stress through relaxing music. High-intensity games commonly abuse this link
by having pounding, electrifying scores that crank up the player’s stress, while low-intensity
games typically have soothing soundtracks that help you zone out and relax. As a game about anxiety, Celeste needs to
tread the fine line of being stressful, but also enjoyable and not inducing so much stress
that it’s overwhelming. The soundtrack helps to strikes this balance
by actually being quite peaceful. Take the track Resurrections, which is a combination
of cues from the second level, The Old Site. It starts with a strolling pace of 72 beats
per minute, features a pretty arpeggiating synth line and dreamy, ambient synth pads
quietly in the back. There’s also a lovely piano part, an instrument
which is used throughout the game to represent Madeline. While the game isn’t terribly difficult
at this early point, you are still learning and thus dying a lot, but the calmness of
the music takes the sting off a little, lowering your stress levels instead of increasing it. This is when Madeline first encounters the
dark Part of Her, and from here on in the level’s gimmick activates: these glowing
space boxes that allow you to dash-swim through them. The soundtrack reacts at this point, adding
extra synth layers to the mix as well as a gentle, steady drum beat. This beat is important as your mind latches
onto the rhythm and it kind of lulls you into a meditative state, allowing you to hone your
concentration as the game’s complexity increases. It’s a similar effect to those lo-fi hip-hop
study mixes you find on YouTube, which combine unobtrusive ambience with chill, repetitive
hip-hop beats that pull you into a trance-like focus, helping you to achieve that magical
zen-like state of being known as flow. Flow can exist when you are hyper-focused
on a difficult task - it requires a certain level of skill to be pushed to its limits
and challenged. It shows that the mind can react to stress
in both positive and negative ways. Positive stress is called eustress, and is invigorating
and productive - it’s what motivates us to learn an instrument, or compete in a competition,
or climb a mountain. Video games are great at tapping into eustress
by providing small challenges with easily defined goals to achieve. This is what allows difficult, stressful games
to ultimately be a fun and rewarding experience. Celeste encourages eustress by finding balance
in its difficulty, limiting many of its challenges to a single screen so an end goal is commonly
in sight. Dying quickly respawns you at the entrance
of the scene, minimising the frustrations of failure. And the game’s simple controls also help,
with only three moves available to Madeline: a jump, a dash and a wall-climb, with complexity being added through a drip-feed of evironmental gimmicks. This means there’s almost never any confusion
as to how to complete a stage, it’s just a matter of successfully pulling off the maneuver. And of course, the peaceful soundtrack tempers
the game’s frustrating difficulty as well. All of this prevents Celeste from causing
too much negative stress, or distress. This is when a challenge is too overwhelming
and leads to anxiety and inaction. Games are also able to cause distress, intentionally
or not, by being too difficult or overloading the player. In Celeste, the boss chase sequences can lean
on the side of distress: sections are often much longer than a single screen, and they
force you to rapidly bound through the level while avoiding projectiles and hazards. And the music is excitable and chaotic, which
all combines for a more tense and distressing experience. And let’s not even get into the gruelling
B-Side and C-Side bonus levels, I am not ready to relive that trauma yet. Pretty much every character in the game experiences
some kind of anxiety in their life. Fellow mountaineer Theo is overly concerned with his social media and how other people view him. Resort owner Mr. Oshiro is unable
to cope with the stress of running his failing business. And Madeline commonly experiences
panic attacks, something that composer Lena Raine was able to relate to and embody in the soundtrack. Lena: “For me, I also suffer from anxiety and
depression, so I identify with Madeline a lot in just kind of the struggles that she’s
dealing with. So musically, when I was scoring that part,
I really wanted to just hone in on the key parts that would make it feel like an anxiety
attack and make the player uncomfortable.” The scene that Lena is talking about here
is the gondola ride. When it stalls outs halfways across the chasm,
Madeline begins to worry and you can hear a hesitant variation of her theme on the piano. This quickly evolves into a panic attack and
her musical theme is completely engulfed by these massive synths that sound like a blaring
alarm, which keep getting louder and louder until the piano is completely drowned out. Theo teaches Madeline a coping technique involving
a feather, and there’s even a little mini-game that makes you do it too. Slowly the synths fade back out until once
again you can just hear the piano playing Madeline’s theme. She has re-found herself and come out the
other side. As someone who has experienced bouts of anxiety
myself, this was an affecting moment for me. I didn’t even realise I was feeling suffocated
until I felt my breathing begin to sync up with the gentle cadence of the floating feather,
and the space returned to the music. Often times it’s hard to recognise when
anxiety begins to set in - it’s more of a gradual build-up that slowly overwhelms
you, rather than reaching a specific breaking point. I’m appreciative that Lena was able to be
so open and imbue this moment with her own personal understanding of anxiety, so that
it may help others understand and recognise the feeling. But it’s not limited to this one story scene
and a moment of anxiety. Just as levels are uniquely built to offer
different challenges, so too is their music built to create different kinds of stress. Let’s look at the third level, the Celestial
Resort, with its spirited caretaker Mr. Oshiro. The hotel doesn’t see a lot of guests and
it’s in a bit of a messy state, not helped by the mountain manifesting Mr. Oshiro’s
anxiety in the form of these little plague dust bunnies. Madeline chooses to help clean up the place
a little, but this only serves to humiliate Mr. Oshiro and further exacerbate his anxiety. Lena said that she wanted to use dynamic music
stems in this section to “reflect Mr. Oshiro’s mental state as you’re cleaning… building
up the track and making it more and more unstable.” You have three wings to clean in any order
you choose, and the music changes its instrumentation on the completion of each. So clearing the first wing adds a spooky theremin. The second replaces it with a heavy synth. And the final wing brings back the theremin
to complete the track. However despite the increasingly frantic music
reflecting Mr. Oshiro’s increasingly frantic mental state, it never dips into distress
because you are in control of Madeline, and Madeline is in control of the situation. There is a great sense of eustress in this
level because there are clear paths to take, objectives to complete, and your progress
is rewarded by the bouncey music piecing itself together. This is not the case after the gondola ride
in The Mirror Temple. It starts off as a creepy, ancient temple
with huge, dark areas you need to light up and branching paths to get lost in. The music, titled Quiet and Falling, is serene
and mysterious, with an ominous piano and a very hollow-sounding synth. Unlike the Celestial Resort’s clear goals,
there’s a lot of aimless wandering here and whenever you unlock a door, nothing in
the music changes to acknowledge your progress. Then Madeline enters the mirror and things
get a little weird. The mountain’s power is strong here, manifesting
Lovecraftian monsters that hunt Madeline down and imprisoning Theo in crystal while eyes
surround and watch him. It’s alien and distressing, they are not
at all in control of the situation. The music fills every available space with layers of eerie, dissonant synths that don’t really go anywhere. And underneath it all, you can hear these
unsettling reversed vocals, which is Lena herself acting out Madeline’s anxious thoughts
in this backwards mirror dimension. (voice: “...and that scares me. I don’t like scaring myself… I don’t… *soft weeping*") The music is a mirror image of the level, reflecting its own aimlessness and alien darkness
to create a palpable sense of anxiety. In the end, Madeline doesn’t quash her anxiety. She grows to understand it and develops methods
in order to cope with it. She learns to respond to the stress in her
life in a healthier way. I myself am trying to learn better ways of
handling my own anxiety, and one of those ways is definitely listening to music. Celeste’s soundtrack has been important
to me in this way over the past month and I think it will continue to be for many years
to come. In the next video I want to talk a little
more personally about this and explain the impact of my favourite video game track of
all time: Fisherman’s Horizon from Final Fantasy VIII. This is in celebration of Game Score Fanfare’s
first birthday earlier this month, and for reaching a new goal on Patreon, where over
100 people now support the channel! I’m so amazed and grateful for the generosity
of so many people, thank you to everyone who has supported the channel over the past year,
financially or otherwise. It all means the world to me, thank you so
much.
I'm so glad Lena Raine is a big name now thanks to Celeste, and a lot of people are talking about her music. Been following her since Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns and I love everything she did. It's a shame she couldn't work on Path of Fire soundtrack, which was really bland and forgettable in the end...
My favourite track from HoT OST from her.
I identified with Madeline (game protagonist) so hard that the game basically ruined my week. No game has hit me as hard as this one, but it also pushed me to change for the better as well. Love this game.
Celeste is one of my favorite games of the past few years--I remember the music dropping out right before the climax of the game, then the music comes back in, and my jaw dropped. Holy FUCK that was one hell of a 'boss battle'.
Celeste is a masterpiece. It's a game that's not going to get nearly the attention it deserves and it's soundtrack is part of that.
I rank Celeste in my top 10 2D platformers of all time. Every aspect of the game contributes very well to a cohesive package, including the music. The game is filled with hundreds of deaths (thousands once you start tackling the optional content), yet never once did I feel frustrated. This was in no small part due to the smoothing music to help keep me calm and focused. The music tells you "you can do this" rather than hyping you up, which is a more sustainable approach for this type of investment. At the same time though, once you've become accustomed to the mechanics of a particular chapter and the section is reaching its climax, the music really picks up and becomes really intense to get you hyped - "this is what you've been building towards, no go face it!" It changes at the perfect moment
God I love this game. Its the best 2D platformer this generation so far (at least that I've played), and its tied with Super Meat Boy in the "difficult, tight-controlled platformer" subgenre for all-time best.
I think one thing the video missed was how satisfying and relaxing the end chapter jingle is. Lena Raine really knocked it out of the park here, hope she works with Matt again in the future, because they've created one of my new favorite games.
Huh. I guess I'm in the minority here. I like the game a lot but I found the music pretty forgettable.