Celeste

The controls are exquisitely calibrated, giving you room to adjust your trajectory in mid-air.

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Partway through Celeste, our mountaineer protagonist Madeline suffers a panic attack. Luckily, her occasional climbing companion, the affable Theo, has a surefire method to calm her down. Visualise a feather, he says, and breathe in and out rhythmically – imagining that each breath out is keeping it airborne. Sure enough, it rises and falls as we push a button, and before long Madeline has regained her composure. That this comes after one of the game’s most frustrating sequences doesn’t appear to be accidental. The technique, it seems, is as much for the player’s benefit as for its hero’s.

That’s because Celeste is one of those games: a pixelart platformer that constantly teeters on the edge of a precipice, the finest of margins separating compulsion and frustration. And, boy, does designer Matt Thorson know it. It’s obvious from the outset, when Madeline tells an old woman of her ambition to climb the titular peak, and the woman’s mocking laughter follows her into the next screen. It’s there, too, when Madeline smashes a mirror and a purple-haired doppelganger emerges – this is, essentially, her inner doubt, the part of her that suggests she should turn back. “Are you the weak part of me, or the lazy part?” Madeline grunts. “I’m the pragmatic part,” her grinning double replies.