In the first three months of the year, I’ve already dumped dozens of hours into big triple-A behemoths. I’ve army crawled through the underbrush of Seattle’s forests inThe Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, fought a giant swamp snake and competed in a card tournament inFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and hacked, slashed, and double jumped my way through multiple dimensions inPrince of Persia: The Lost Crown. But the best 2024 game I’ve played is still the smallest: Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain.
Celeste 64is small by most standards, at two hours long. It feels like a demo for a masterpiece that developer Extremely OK games will probably never make, more than a full game in and of itself. It’s way smaller than other indies I’ve played this year, likeUltros, and it’s even smaller thanSilent Hill: The Short Message, which basically was a demo. You say, “Too short!” I say, “Just short enough!” Plus, it’s free so the only thing you need to spend is a little time.
But the real selling point isn’t its price or its length; it’s how well it translates the flawless platforming of Celeste to a point of view that makes that precision significantly tougher to nail. A riff on the 3DMariogames from the turn of the century, Celeste takes the familiar aesthetic of the Forsaken City opening level from the original game, gives Madeline all the mechanics she learned over the course of her whole adventure, and packs them into one geographically tiny platforming playground. Familiar characters return, too, and though EXOK’s next announced game isEarthblade, not Celeste 2, this feels like a fitting interstitial until we finally get to the next phase of Madeline’s journey.
This has me thinking about how small is too small for a game (or any work of art) to be truly great. Like, I loveWes Anderson’s Roald Dahl adaptation Poison, but it’s a 17-minute-long short film. Could I really rank it among his best work when The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Royal Tenenbaums are so much meatier in comparison? I go back and forth about whether or not to even include short films on my yearly personal Letterboxd rankings because the reduced length makes them feel like a bit of a different beast from feature films. And, obviously, awards bodies treat them as different beasts, too, with shorts lumped into their own categories.
But, in games, we don’t have the formal designation between a long game and a short game. You know that a movie will almost always be somewhere between 80 and 180 minutes, but games are far more varied. A game can be five minutes or 200 hours and those are both just games. We typically group by the size of the studio making the game rather than length, designating works indie or triple-A depending on the money and workforce behind them.
Should we have a separate category for short games? I don’t know. All I know is that Celeste 64 is going to be ignored in most GOTY discussions because it’s only one level long, and it deserves to be considered more seriously than that.
