Celeste 64 Takes The Popular Platformer Back In Time…Or Forward

The indie hit Celeste turned six this weekend, and as a special birthday present, Extremely OK Games (the makers of the original) have remade the game’s world in a low-poly, low-res fashion reminiscent of the Nintendo 64. However, given that the pixel visuals of the original Celeste are meant to evoke the 8-bit machines of the 1980s (and the game was originally thought up on a facsimile, the Pico-8)…is this actually a leap forward?

Celeste 64 once again has you controlling Madeline, and once again tasks the player with climbing Celeste Mountain using Maddie’s handful of skills: jumping, wall-kicking and boosting in midair. However, the third dimension adds a bit of extra challenge, and the game was already hard enough (this reporter could not figure out how to scale the first wall in front of him).

It’s too bad Celeste 64 wasn’t built to run on a real N64, but pulling that off would be a lot harder than it looks. Today’s programming languages are completely different from what the N64 used, and there’s currently no such thing as an N64 “engine” like Unity or Unreal that you can drop in and build upon. It’d all have to be from scratch and probably take at least a year. This PC equivalent, which simply mimics the N64’s look, was whipped up in a week.

Celeste 64 costs nothing; it’s free to download from this itch.io page. All you need is a controller and your skills. Both Windows and Linux versions are available.

Gear up for the Celeste 6th Anniversary Challenge! ?

Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain is here and you can play it on @itchio.

? https://t.co/By2BxOUwx9 pic.twitter.com/N4ILmFEYmN

— Celeste (@celeste_game) January 30, 2024