Celeste: the part of yourself you would rather not look at

Celeste (Matt Makes Games, 2018) looks, at first contact, like a very hard platformer about climbing a mountain. Two hours later you realise the mountain is the easy part. The real subject appears when Madeline meets a version of herself, dark and mocking, who follows her through the levels telling her she will not make it. She calls this figure Part of Me. Players call her Badeline. And Madeline’s first reaction is the most human one available: try to get rid of her.

The game is about an attempted expulsion

Notice the actual plot, which is not the climbing. Madeline goes up the mountain to prove something to herself. On the way, the mountain materialises what she is carrying, and what appears is not an external monster: it is her. Badeline has her face, her voice, her memories. And she says, with cruel precision, exactly what Madeline thinks when nobody is listening. From there the game becomes a chase, with Madeline trying to outrun a part of herself that insists on coming along.

Klein and the operation of cutting in half

Melanie Klein described this operation in a 1946 paper, Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. She proposes that the infant, very early on, deals with anxiety by dividing the world in two: there is the good object, which satisfies, and the bad object, which persecutes. And the point that matters here is that this splitting does not affect only external objects, it affects the ego as well. The child separates within itself an acceptable part from an unbearable one, and treats the second as if it were foreign.

Klein called this arrangement the paranoid-schizoid position, and took care to say it is not a stage one crosses and leaves behind. It is a position, somewhere we return to whenever anxiety tightens. Faced with what is unbearable in oneself, the quickest way out remains the same as in childhood: that thing is not me.

Badeline is not the villain, she is the exiled piece

That is why Badeline works so well as a figure. She is not a demon, a possession or a curse. She is what was left outside when Madeline decided which part of herself was allowed to stay. And she behaves exactly as repressed material behaves: she returns, insists, turns up at the wrong moment and grows stronger the harder she is pushed away. The scene where Madeline tries to leave her behind and the game simply will not let you proceed is a good description of what happens when someone tries to get on with life while keeping a piece locked in the basement.

The turn is not defeating her, it is integrating her

The decisive moment of Celeste is well known, and it is worth noticing exactly what happens in it. Madeline does not defeat Badeline. She does not kill her, convince her or expel her. She stops running, listens, acknowledges that this is also her, and proposes they climb together. And the mechanical effect inside the game is striking: from then on Madeline gains a second dash, she literally jumps higher. The part that was weight becomes force.

Klein described this movement in 1935, in a paper on manic-depressive states, and called it the depressive position. It is the moment when a person stops operating with two separate objects, one all good and one all bad, and manages to sustain that it is the same object, with both things inside. This costs dearly, because guilt for what was attacked comes with it. But it is what makes reparation possible, and Klein considered that capacity an essential part of mental health.

Why the mechanics teach better than the script

Many people have said Celeste is a game about anxiety, and it is. But it gets one thing right that almost every representation gets wrong. It promises no cure, removes no symptom, does not make the mountain easier. What changes is the relationship: the same screens that were torture remain hard, except Madeline now climbs with the part that used to burn energy on denial. Anyone who has been through analysis recognises the shape of it. The anxiety does not disappear, what shrinks is the effort spent pretending it is not yours.

Perhaps that is why the game stuck with so many people who do not care about platformers at all. Celeste says, without motivational speech and without a magical ending, something uncomfortable and true: the part of you that you most want to leave at the foot of the mountain is precisely the one that has to come along.