Let me tell you a story. I am going to warn you about a couple of things before I begin though. First off, this will contain a couple of spoilers for the game Celeste. Nothing too major will be talked about except for a couple of collectibles but if you wanted to take the time to find them on your own, then feel free to miss out on my little story. The second thing is that this story will make me sound like an idiot, because I was being an idiot. There are some times where the answer is right in front of you and yet it just doesn’t click. This is one of those kinds of stories. Now let me start off where it all began in Chapter 1. I was hunting for the collectible strawberries, because if there are collectibles I am legally obligated to go after them, and I happened upon an area with a flashing television monitor which was cycling through the same sequence of colors on repeat. Right next to it was a swarm of colorful birds that had the same colors that were flashing on the monitor. Every now and then they would pause for a second and each one would dash out into a different cardinal direction. Now, obviously something was hidden here. There is no way this could all be a coincidence. So I sat there for a while thinking about what I could do. My only abilities were jumping, climbing and being able to dash in eight directions, but how could any of those possibly be useful to me in this situation? Yeah, this was my first I’m a fool moment as I left and didn’t think about this “puzzle” until much later. Now we are going to skip ahead a bit to later on in the game at a certain section of Chapter 6.
Chapter 6 was one of the chapters that I took the longest to complete. Not so much because of its difficulty, although it was a little challenging. the main reason is because I got stuck at a certain point in the level because I didn’t know how to progress past a certain point. There was this feather in the ground that I found hidden that allowed me to travel further upwards into a certain section. It only led to this one room that had four unlit torches and six colored gems on the wall. Needless to say that I was stuck. I had no idea how to solve this puzzle and I had no idea what the colored gems and symbols on the wall under the torches were supposed to represent. So I ended up leaving the game on hold for a while. I will admit that I should have maybe thought back a bit and realized this puzzle was probably not the way to progress the story, but clearly I wasn’t thinking. That can be a bad habit of mine. By the way, I did eventually find out that I was being dumb and that wasn’t the way forward in the level. The solution to this one was simple. Remember how I said there was a hidden feather that led me further upwards. Yeah, I just needed to ignore it and go to the right to get to the next screen. What I assume happened was since the leevel had a lot of verticality to it, I just assumed I had to keep going upwards for some reason. I guess I got in my own head, yet another bad habit of mine. So eventually I beat Chapter 6 and got through to the end game after being stuck for no reason other than my own foolishness. That’s another addition to the myriad of dumb moments I had while playing Celeste. After that things went a lot smoother if you don’t count the number of deaths I had, the game didn’t let it slide though, and I proceeded to the endgame. Then I was met with an interesting fact. You needed all the heart collectible to unlock the endgame content. At the time I didn’t have many so it was time to go back and look at things I missed. You can probably see where this is going.
So now it was time for me to try and solve these puzzles and since you already can tell that I can’t even pay the slightest bit of attention to my surroundings, I had my work cut out for me. Thankfully upon going back to the first area with the birds i realized that the pattern of colors on the television was the same as the gems in the room on Chapter 6. In other words, I needed to solve this puzzle in Chapter 1 so that I could solve the puzzle in Chapter 6. This is the part where I started taking down notes. I figured maybe that would help me. It didn’t really do much though. At least not yet. What actually got me to the solution was I did my typical frustation dance and dashed all over the place asking myself what I was supposed to do. Now what would have been funny was if I unlocked it by randomly doing that for a while, but instead after I calmed down I realized that I was able to dash in eight directions and the birds happened to dash out every so often after the sequence ended. So I dashed north, west, southeast, northeast, west again, and finally northwest. This allowed to claim my prize: the crystal heart. So I went back to Chapter 6 after having figured it all out and did the same dance as before. And finally…. it happened. One of the torches lit up. Great! Now only three more to go. Now I figured it had something to do with the original pattern so I thought to look at the pictures and see if they could help. I could not understand the symbols though. I decided then to try and see what would happen if I reversed all of the directions in the sequence. So I dashed in the sequence of down, right, northwest, southwest, right again and finally southeast. Then I got the fourth torch to light up. So I was at least on the right track, but I was still missing something. Then after staring at my screen for a while it came to me. the only way to solve this was… geometry. Basically what I had to do was copy down their directions on a graph and reflect them over the x-axis and the y-axis to find mirror images. Doing both would lead to the complete opposite which I had already done. So I did two more dances to light two more torches and earned myself another crystal heart. Who would’ve thought that something I learned in school would actually end up being useful. Go figure. I hope you all enjoyed my little story and I will hoper to see you all again mext time.
That Casual Gamer Guy 