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Celeste Golden Strawberries

If you've talked to me at all over the past three months, you know that I've fallen in love with a game called Celeste. It's a platformer about climbing a mountain. The game has beautiful art, amazing music, and the best depiction of mental health issues I've ever seen in popular media. It's also an incredibly difficult game, which makes me really happy.

One of the hardest challenges in Celeste comes after you have completed the first 16 (of 24) levels, and that is the golden strawberry. Every level gains a golden strawberry at the beginning of the level, and in order to get it, you have to take it to the end of the level without dying. There are 175 normal strawberries in the game, and 24 golden strawberries from deathless runs. There is also one final super secret golden strawberry, for a total of 200 strawberries. I've taken it upon myself to collect every last one of these strawberries to achieve that glorious 200.

The first golden strawberry I got was the super secret one, actually! In order to get it, you have to complete level 1-a without dashing. Yes, it's possible. Yes, it's incredibly difficult. The first time I did this, it took about 6 hours and ~3000 deaths, but the game didn't give me the strawberry at the end, probably because I had dashed at some point and not realized it. I immediately tried this again, and completed the level in 58 minutes and 816 deaths. This time, the game did give me the strawberry!

I didn't want to upload this image to Twitter when I took it, because I was worried about spoiling people about its existence. I have since stopped worrying about this.

Immediately after getting the 1-a dashless golden strawberry, I decided that I wanted to speed run it. I pretty quickly got really good at completing the level without dashing, and I was able to keep improving my time. I ended up buying a capture card so I could record myself running. My current personal best is 3:04.484, which I achieved on April 14th.

I submitted the video to speedrun.com, and as of writing this post, my time is number 7 on the leaderboard:

Here is the leaderboard, although you have to click "Dashless" in order to see it.

After that, I got the golden strawberries for 1-a, 2-c, 2-a, and 4-c. I didn't take any pictures to show these accomplishments off.

The A sides of chapters 1 and 2 were pretty easy, but chapter 3 kicks up the difficulty quite a bit, so I decided to skip forward and try to do 4-a first. This was still more difficult than any other golden strawberry I had gotten so far because of the length of the level. I was so excited when I got the strawberry that I completely fumbled the screenshot button on the Switch, so this tweet doesn't actually show the strawberry resolving:

I spent like 9 days practicing and trying to get the strawberry for 5-a. It's an even longer level than 4-a, and the Theo mechanic in the final section of the level hikes the difficulty up by a lot. That section ended up being the real roadblock for me, because I was able to consistently get up to the Theo section, but when I got there, it was difficult to find repeatable approaches to the rooms. It also took me about 6.5 minutes to get up to Theo each time because I didn't attempt to perform the huge skip in the fourth section.

Regardless, I got it in the end! I also discovered that the Switch allows you to retroactively record 30 seconds of gameplay, so this tweet is a little more exciting, even though the video starts right after the last actual room:

I got 1-c like an hour later.

5-c didn't take much time for me either -- I ended up getting it on a plane the day after I got 5-a and 1-c. If you know me, I don't usually handle flights very well, so it's possible that playing Celeste helped me stay centered. It certainly worked out in favor of my quest to get all 200 strawberries, anyway!

The run was so short that the 30 second video from the Switch was almost enough to capture the entire run, only missing a single second in the beginning, which is a shame because I performed a sweet wave dash to skip an annoying wall kick. I also performed an even sweeter wave dash at the beginning of the third room, though, also to skip an annoying wall kick, so that's still satisfying to watch.

I got 3-c the next day, firmly embedding the thought in my mind that I could probably get all of the A- and C-sides. This is the first deathless strawberry that I managed to record using my capture card, so the video shows the entire run (which was actually only 37 seconds long). My favorite trick I perfomed in this run is the wave dash I used in the second room to avoid having to do any wall kicks, which I'm sure is also responsible for knocking off at least a few seconds from the run.

After doing 3 C-sides in a row, I realized I would have to also do some A-sides. After 1-c, I realized that the C-sides were going to be easier than the A- and B- sides simply because of how short they were, so I was enjoying knocking a few of them off. However, the A-sides are pretty brutal, and I thought it would be nice to be able to intersperse the rest of the A- and C-sides so that I wasn't on one brutal challenge after another. Please ignore how this leaves me with all eight B-sides in a row after finishing the A- and C-sides -- at that point, I didn't think I was going to actually be able to do the B-sides.

So, I finally returned to 3-a, which really did prove to be a challenge, mostly because it's so long. The fight with Oshiro at the end was also particularly frightening. I only have the 30 second video from the Switch, which really does not do this 8.5 minute run justice. You can see the absolutely terrifying moment at around 8:11 in-game-time, though.

I was really worried about chapter 6, but 6-c turned out alright. I have the whole video of this one thanks to my capture card. The only real trick I did was the wave dash at the very beginning, although I do really like the little water hops I did (for no reason) at the end of the second room.