The Anxiety of Celeste and its Music

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments

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.

👍︎︎ 14 👤︎︎ u/Herald_of_Ash 📅︎︎ Apr 15 2018 đź—«︎ replies

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.

👍︎︎ 44 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Apr 15 2018 đź—«︎ replies

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'.

👍︎︎ 10 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Apr 15 2018 đź—«︎ replies

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.

👍︎︎ 22 👤︎︎ u/aloehart 📅︎︎ Apr 15 2018 đź—«︎ replies

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.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Galaxy40k 📅︎︎ Apr 15 2018 đź—«︎ replies

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.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/DeltaBurnt 📅︎︎ Apr 15 2018 đź—«︎ replies

Huh. I guess I'm in the minority here. I like the game a lot but I found the music pretty forgettable.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Apr 16 2018 đź—«︎ replies
Captions
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.
Info
Channel: Game Score Fanfare
Views: 608,360
Rating: 4.9537554 out of 5
Keywords: game score fanfare, Celeste, Celeste ost, celeste soundtrack, celeste music, celeste anxiety, celeste depression, lena raine, celeste lena raine, celeste review, celeste analysis, celeste music analysis, celeste ressurections, celeste gameplay, celeste quiet and falling, celeste mirror temple, celeste cover, celeste remix, vgm, video game music, kuraine, game music analysis, celeste ost b side, celeste checking in, celeste first steps, celeste scattered and lost
Id: jvETIcMXaEo
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)
Published: Sat Apr 14 2018
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.