Maybe I'm behind in what's popular in indie gaming, but I've just recently discovered , a beautiful and challenging platformer that has been released on Steam, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. Better still was learning it was developed by two indie Canadian developers Matt Thorson and Noel Berry.
I've been playing some great mobile platformers lately, most notably and , so I immediately checked to see if Celeste was going to come out on Android. Instead, I found that a legacy version of Celeste is already out on mobile.
Celeste Classic is the original version of Celeste that was made by Berry and Thorson as part of a 4-day game jam. If you've played and loved the full game you might be disappointed by the simplified graphics and short gameplay, but as a fan of game development, I really loved seeing how a game evolves from proof of concept to a full-fledged title.
Your goal in Celeste Classic is to climb a treacherous mountain using your character's abilities to jump, wall-jump, and dash. You progress through each level by collecting the berry (sometimes hidden) and jumping up through the top of the level.
This particular version of Celeste Classic for Android is specifically designed with speedrunning in mind. Every time you die or complete a level you'll see your current time flash in the top corner. The touch controls are a bit wonky, and in spite of the 4-way directional pad, it's actually an 8-way directional pad and you're able to dash diagonally, too.
Celeste Classic pales in comparison to the Steam version of Celeste, but then again that's sort of unfair to compare a game jam game to the game Celeste would eventually become. To its credit, Celeste Classic is a free-to-play game for mobile with no ads or in-app purchases, and it's a great way to see if it's worth your money to buy Celeste on another platform!