Developers of the 2018 platformer, Celeste, have come together to celebrate the game’s third anniversary. In honor of the original, the developers have released a surprise semi-sequel. The director of Celeste, Maddy Thorson, posted the news to Twitter on Monday. The tweet shared a link to the new game named Celeste Classic 2.
A brief description that accompanied the game tells fans how the sequel was created in just three days. The original game’s developers — Maddy Thorson, Noel Berry, and Lena Raine — came back together to make Celeste Classic 2. The PICO-8 game is available to play within a web browser for free. You can try out the new game right now by following this link.
Celeste Classic 2 is clearly set in the original Celeste universe. However, instead of the main protagonist Madeleine and her air-dash ability, users are introduced to Lani and her grappling hook. Lani is able to move horizontally instead of Madeline’s ability to jump vertically. Players will play as Lani while she hikes around a mountain.
The original platform game Celeste was released back in 2018. It followed a girl named Madeline as she climbed Mount Celeste and faced her inner demons along the way. The game released to widespread critical acclaim, and we even listed Celeste at number 35 on our top 50 games of the decade. According to USGamer, one of the reasons the platformer became so big was its popularity in the speedrunning community. Celeste’s design offers secret paths for speedrunners to find and even features an internal speedrunning timer. You can learn more about Celeste on Maddy Thorson’s blog, where they touch on subjects from Madeline’s transgender identity to the physics behind their games.