Exploring Celeste's Puzzle Maps



Celeste, the indie platformer, aside from the world record speedruns, has a large dedicated Modding community (using Everest) including many popular mods such as Strawberry Jam, D-Sides, Spring Collab, etc. New ones are released everyday, with most being easy and beginner friendly to some being the hardest maps, or impossible TAS only ones.

There are many genres of Celeste Mods, from open world maps to difficult tech spam, however my favourite of these is puzzles, such as Dropzle, Crystal Garden, Break My Ivory Tower, etc. Puzzle Maps are the main topic of this video, talking about the multiple types of them, highlighting my favourite ones, and some comparisons with some Mario games and all, so i’d love to hear everyones opinions on them so be sure to comment your thoughts !!

video created by Seaze (seazeiscool) aka me hiii, footage almost fully my own except for some maps like Parrot Dash, Clantis, etc. This took multiple months to make, so please like the video if you enjoyed watching and maybe found more fun maps to play, and ofcourse subscribe if you’d want to see more Celeste video essays in this style !

maps mentioned: Dropzle, Zipps’ Tower, U+21CE, Abandoned Aqueduct, BABA IS DREAM, FFFFF, PERCEPTIONS, Maze Of Glass, Puzzle Island, Crystal Garden, Ivory, Break My Ivory Tower, 12 Days of TASmas, Dash Trials, Celeste MinDash, Birdsong, Labyrinth Mu, and others.

0:00 – Intro
1:56 – Part 1: “limitation” puzzle maps
13:08 – Part 2: more puzzle maps
25:55 – Part 3 TAS puzzle maps
35:05 – Part 4: some thoughts

Discord: seazeiscool
Twitter: SeazeCool

#celestegame #celeste

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46 thoughts on “Exploring Celeste's Puzzle Maps”

  1. AWESOME video, oh my lord! I’m probably biased but you discussed a ton of awesome celeste maps and did a really good job at boiling down their mechanics effectively! We definitely need to see more and I hope this video gets morr people interested in puzzle maps whether they like it or not😊

    Side note, I actually planned on making a longer version of abandoned aqueduct? It has been on the backburner for a while though – and you actually cheesed the final room via battery grabs, theres actually a second room transition required to get the battery up there.

    but yeah sick video!!!!!!! that baba is dream map sounds like it kinda sucks though who made that one anyway

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  2. can't believe the celeste community hated puzzle maps so much they cheesed crystal garden instead of routing it and beating it intended smh

    great video although unfortunately as a celeste player I couldn't solve it

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  3. thank you for making this into a video instead of just posting the script (i am a celeste player so i cannot read)

    extremely cool video! very very glad to see more people talking about puzzle maps. as a mapper i will now contribute to the number of puzzle maps by not playtesting my gameplay for readability and then claiming it's a routing puzzle map

    (this is a joke i do want to *try* making a puzzle map at some point now actually)

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  4. Heya! Sick ass video! I’m glad puzzle maps are coming into vogue with this community. I’m glad to hear you like Perceptions, tho I agree cp3 was kinda rushed, unfortunately. Celeste needs more puzzle maps!

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  5. Great video! There's definitely a good bit of macropuzzle potential that could stem from rooms one can reenter and reset like a mario maker door. I believe there are some maps that do explore this a bit (A Blocked Off Path comes to mind) but I definitely highly look forward to what you're cooking. Also, considering the idea of mario having more "interactions" than celeste, Val once pointed out that mario (specifically SMW) is much more focused on (to use celeste's terminology) Actors like theo or puffers, while Celeste is more focused on blocks. There's still, I think, a lot you can do with blocks (Perceptions) but it's a wholly distinct flavor of puzzle having only a handful of Actors in celeste.

    P.S. I'm sorry to toot my own horn but if you haven't seen it Misty Grotto, another map of mine, is quite similar to the note-taking puzzle of maze of glass (or at least closer than it is to most celeste gameplay)

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  6. no KoKoDoKo? mention 😔

    great video! Puzzle maps are definitely underappreciated glad to see someone talk about them more!

    Also im sure you know about it but Path of Most Resistance from Chinese New Year Collab 2023 is probably the most interesting mechanic for a puzzle map ive seen so far.

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  7. i love puzzle maps! they're quite underappreciated and i wish there was more of them and people would enjoy them more instead of writing "i hate dropzle" in the dropzle clear video comment section. problem with making more puzzle maps is that they require such a different skill set to create then normal maps, because you have to make puzzles not extremely tedius but also not extremely boring

    and i agree we need more eevee helper abuse!!!!!!!! there are soo many eevee helper mechanics that are like not used!!!!! they would even be intresting in non-puzzle maps
    (core zones, room chests, making things fall like jellies)

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  8. 23:17 wow what a cool route map for maze of glass i wonder who made that !? also awesome video – there are so many puzzle maps that I've never heard of that i really want to play now. For the maps that I have played, I thought you described their individual strengths (and weaknesses) so well!

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  9. I can't argue that celeste puzzle maps can and are very creative and good, but Celeste is a precision platformer game and the people who are gonna play these maps are people who have played celeste enough to want to try out custom maps and generally they are people who like precision platforming and not puzzles, in the same way that putting a platforming challenge in a puzzle game would alienate most of its players. The demographic of celeste players who also like puzzles is small. Not to discredit people who make puzzle maps of course, I'm sure they are really good. Reminds me of a negative celeste review I saw once: "Great game, just not for me."

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  10. As a hardcore puzzle game lover with a taste for extreme difficulty, I'm being honest when I'm saying I have literally never enjoyed a celeste puzzle map, and there are several reasons to dislike them outside of just a distaste for puzzles. A puzzle game lives and dies on its UX, and the celeste engine becomes a horrible mandatory membrane of awkwardness when it's used to express methodical puzzle design. Even if a puzzle is well designed, putting it in a celeste mod sacrifices it. Like I don't want to play a good puzzle if it has annoying separation and abstraction between inputs & gamestate, where there's no undo button and it's a given that there will be an extra few minutes of faff and error after you figure out the solution but haven't actually inputted it into the stodgy construction yet. Crystal Enigma and Dropzle are literally exactly the same to me.

    I know celeste modders make celeste mods partly because designing levels for a game they already love is more fun for them than making a game from scratch, but look… man, puzzlescript is RIGHT there.

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  11. this took Multiple Months to make pretty much working on this every day, would appreciate any interactions, i rly want this to do well :3

    Also Correction: the solution i mentioned at 9:39 for aqueduct final room is actually cheese, the intended solution does not involve the battery grabs to climb up, rather you'd need to use the screen transition TWICE to do what i did. kinda unfortunate i didnt realise this because this intended solution is So Much Cooler and wouldve helped me emphasize the point on screen transitions more,

    anyways some other notes ill add here about the video itself:
    -i'm unsure about the approach i took here where i kinda did spoil a bit of each map by explaining atleast 1 room (with some having me explain multiple puzzles) which like, i get that it is kind of spoiling part of the experience of figuring out those rooms for the people that may have wanted to play those maps. but also i think it is very important to discuss atleast 1 example from each map to get a gist or it and understand what makes the maps good or bad, idk
    -i probably should have put more emphasis on the complexity of Break My ivory Tower, it is so beyond anything else to where it deserves more screen time
    -i dont think Dropzle is that great honestly its probably my least favourite map of the video if we forget about crystal enigma, not to say its bad or anything but i think as others mentioned it is pretty tedious (especially final room) and annoying to play, along with not being very interesting and kinda just, boring with the basic mechanics
    -the entire FFFFF section of this video is a bit weak, i dont think its really much of a puzzle aside from a few rooms anyways
    -Birdsong is honestly extremely creative, couldnt dedicate a section for it because video length but i love the idea of disabling ground refills and using the shielded feathers for refills, the routing is so unexpected from what youd expect at first with the order of operations

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  12. For SJ, I definitely prefered a gift from the stars and pointless machines over dropzle. Idk they felt more involved and the ambience on dropzle was lackluster (which is also true for pointless machines but still)

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  13. As someone who usually prefer celeste puzzle free, i need to shout out Hexagon Force, which haves the player control both madeline and badeline at the same time, which leads to some unique puzzles that only works in celeste.

    Appriciate the vid as always 🙂

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  14. Banger video! I've got a few maps I haven't heard of to try.

    However I don't think you mentioned where all of these are from? The ones I know are largely in collabs and contests, maybe throw those in the description.

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  15. im glad youre giving author credit but id really wish youd specify when a map is in a collab, and which. because its really hard to find a map from just a name and an author when its hidden away in a collab
    (to be clear im also referring to maps that were just shown and not mentioned)

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