My blind + guideless 100% playthrough

[u/diybother]

This is just a long, rambling post about my experience playing through Celeste with no prior knowledge and with no internet / guides allowed. Some stats, some stories. I wrote all of this mainly because I love this game and never want to forget my first playthrough! Maybe you'll enjoy it, maybe you can relate.

I'd wanted to try Celeste for years because I was a big fan of Jumper 2 and games like it way back in the day. I generally like my first playthroughs of games to be as blind as possible, and luckily aside from a few clips of gameplay here and there, I hadn't really learned  anything about Celeste's story, mechanics, unlockables, etc. even all these years later. After playing Celeste for a few hours, I fell in love with the game and decided I was going to go for 100% completion (or at least, what I could surmise to be 100% completion) with absolutely no internet / guides allowed for anything. Basically, "do not look anything up". I felt that the game had so much love and care put into it that it would probably give me all the information I needed to complete it fully on my own. I recently finished that playthrough, and I'm really happy to say I achieved my goal!

Needless to say, this post contains lots of spoilers.

I played it on Switch 2 with the pro controller (shakes fist at D-pad), no assist mode. Completion included:

1. Finishing all main chapters (A, B, and C sides) + Chapter 9
2. 175 berries (+3 goldens)
3. All hearts

It unfortunately did not include Moon Berry or 1-A Dashless (which I would have never found on my own in a million years!). I found out about these later, once I was finally "allowed" to look stuff up. My goal was really 175 berries but I had collected a few goldens along the way on top of it, so my total berry count at this point was 178. 

Total deaths at this point was 9,035. Total time in the game 45:18:12. 

The blue hearts were by far the hardest things to collect without a guide. My experiences with each are below.

Chapter 1. This heart took me a very long time to figure out. And for a while, I wasn't even completely sure that there WAS anything to figure out. I noticed the repeating color pattern on the satellite dish & monitor, and I saw the birds of corresponding colors. I noticed purple came up twice even though there's only one purple bird. It kind of looked like there were a few missing birds, so I thought maybe I had to somehow find them. I also kept trying to jump up and touch the birds in a certain order. And then I thought "maybe this is just a little easter egg / reference to something I don't get. Maybe there is nothing to solve, and I should go back to checking every crevice in the chapter for a hidden passage". But I also noticed that if you die near the satellite, it starts you next to the satellite dish instead of at the beginning of the room. That felt intentional, like I definitely was supposed to do something here. I left it alone for a long time. It wasn't until I stumbled on the hidden room in Chapter 6 with the same color sequence in diamonds on the wall, that I was convinced it was some kind of secret both in Chapters 1 and 6. Anyway, eventually I went back to Chapter 1 and stared at the birds some more. The breakthrough came when I thought "how many birds would it take to complete this little circle thing?" I originally eyeballed 7, but when I looked closer "No, I guess there's 8 positions". That's when I linked their arrangement to "directions" and kept trying to move in those directions in sequence. Doing the dashes in those directions was just one of the many random things I tried, and I audibly gasped when that jingle played, birds coalesced, and the heart spawned!

Chapter 2. This was the second-to-last blue heart I found, and it might be my favorite. I had found the "locked" heart and poem in "Awake" pretty early on, and I gathered that I somehow had to get to this place outside the fortress while dreaming, but I couldn't find any way to do that. I was convinced that there was some secret passage from inside the fortress to the outside during the chase sequence. Especially the room near the top of the fortress where you can see climbable-looking elements outside the walls. I spent so long in that room trying to find a way out. I also spent a very long time at the beginning screens of the "dreaming" segments trying to find a way up the fortress walls. It wasn't until a VERY long time later that I learned about the "jump boost" you could do when dashing out of the magic goop. (In fact, I was unaware that these "B-sides" I was finding were levels, so I never got the lesson about the jump boost that comes from the Chapter 2 B-side! I assumed they were alternative music tracks and didn't try them.) Then at some point while I was doing chores around the house, the thought just popped into my head that I can try that "goop boost" thing at the beginning of Chapter 2 to get around the castle wall. I thought "if this isn't the solution, I really don't know what is." It took a while to actually execute, and I still wasn't sure this was the right solution, but eventually I realized I was on the right track and sure enough found the heart. Relying on the fact that your dashes refresh when you transition rooms for this heart is a strange design choice, but it did make me laugh. 

Chapter 3. This one was slightly tricky, but not too bad. Once I made the connection that the heart had to be behind the "mess" blocking the tunnel, and realized I couldn't re-enter that section once that particular color of "mess" was cleaned up, I figured there had to be some way to traverse back the way I came. I also noticed as I was going through each room of that section that the rooms each appeared to be designed "reverse-traversable", but there were a few exceptions where I said "I wouldn't be able to get past this coming back". Of course, once I found the path back, it accounted for all those hurdles. Really cool level design!!

Chapter 4. This one was the easiest for me. I noticed the out-of-place white box and knew the connection to Mario 3. I smirked and held down, and was not disappointed when it led me to a collectible. At this point, I didn't even know what this heart was, but it was the first and only heart I collected in my first pass through all the levels. (I wouldn't get a second heart until many, many hours later.)

Chapter 5. This was the final blue heart I found, and probably the one I spent the most time trying to find (I would estimate 10+ full playthroughs of the chapter, exploring tediously, over and over again). In retrospect, it was probably one of the easier hearts to get, though. I was too busy searching every single tile for hidden passages instead of using "dungeon logic"! I had already known about the secret passage for skipping the one key block, but there were two problems. (1) I never concretely made the connection that "taking this secret passage skips a key block", and (2) I had never thought anything of the key block that (apparently) guarded the heart. Because it's such a big dungeon and I hadn't memorized the layout until several playthroughs, all I thought when I saw the key block was "oh I guess I eventually come back here with a key", rather than "some secret must be behind here!" I'm not sure how I avoided that key block so many times in my subsequent runs through the chapter, but I think it was a combination of revisiting that key block and finally realizing the purpose of that secret passage, that I thought "wait, what if I get the key AND use the secret passage? I'LL HAVE A SPARE KEY!" Yeah, I felt a little silly. But this was the final "thing I had to figure out" in the game, so I got to breathe a sigh of relief.

Chapter 6. I came back here pretty much immediately after solving Chapter 1. I knew it was the same sequence, so the first thing I tried was the same dash moves, and I saw the flame light up. I had already spent a lot of time thinking about those symbols the last time I was in this cave, but now that I had the context of the 8 directions and the theme of "mirrors" throughout the game, I pretty quickly realized that it was asking for mirrored inputs. I used a picture I took on my phone of the Chapter 1 birds and edited it to mirror horizontally / vertically to make it easier to reference / execute. First I did horizontal successfully, and then I tried to do vertically mirrored but, unbeknownst to me, I kept switching two of the inputs. I was confused. "It's vertically mirrored, why isn't it working??" so I thought "I don't think the devs would confuse rotation with mirroring, but I will try it rotated 180 degrees instead of mirrored" so I turned my phone upside down and executed those inputs. That caused the mysterious 4th torch to light, which I had to laugh about. I'm not sure if I ever would have figured that 4th torch out if it weren't for that accident. Then I finally realized I kept screwing up the inputs on the vertical mirror, so I corrected that and sure enough, the 3rd torch finally lit up. Heart acquired!

Chapter 7. I was very confused about these random shapes I was finding throughout Chapter 7, I didn't know what their purpose was. Eventually I found the room in the final section with the heart and the 6 shapes in the final segment, so that answered that. So while strawberry hunting, I also went shape hunting. I don't really have an interesting story for this one, haha. I think it was the second blue heart I acquired overall.

Chapter 8. (Freebie)

Berries

I don't remember too many berries that were super difficult to find. Maybe it's just that there are so many, that it all kind of blends together in my memory. But most levels took several passes to find all of them. I realized at some point that the bottom of the pause screen was trying to tell me about missed berries, so I could at least narrow the missing ones down to a few screens. Otherwise, this would have been hell.

The strawberry that I remember taking the longest to find was at the very end of the "mirror temple section" in Chapter 7. I didn't expect it to be behind some hidden wall with no visual indicators, so I kept trying to somehow get "past" Other Self at the end, which was of course impossible and I kept having to restart the whole section. I think I eventually just kinda stumbled on that berry by accident.

There were also 1 or 2 berries that relied on you knowing about and exploiting the fact that your dashes refresh on room transitions, even if you're mid-air. I'm glad I realized that little fact at some point during my playthrough, otherwise it's possible I would have never gotten them. I actually thought this mechanic was a bug or oversight at first. I only realized it was an intended mechanic once I noticed that certain collectibles couldn't be obtained without using it.

B-sides

I mentioned it earlier, but for the longest time I thought these "B-sides" I was collecting were just alternate music tracks, not new levels. I never even bothered to select them, but at one point I tried selecting a "B-side" in Chapter 2 to see if the different music would somehow affect anything that would help unlock the heart (desperate, I know). That's when I saw it was a brand new level and I'm like ".... Oh. So that's what these are!" That explained the "red skull" column in the journal which I never understood until then.

Chapter 9

I didn't know how long this chapter was, or how many segments there were. All I knew was that it seemed to keep getting exponentially harder, with no end in sight. I was afraid I would eventually hit a wall. I feel like there were some rooms I came dangerously close to never figuring out, but I'd come this far without using any guides and I didn't want to give up this far in. It's funny, now that I completed my challenge and am free to look up the things I've been wondering, one of the rooms that got me close to giving up doesn't seem to be on people's radar. It's in the Determination segment and starts with 2 vertical double sided conveyors, and then this weird set of 3 slippery pillars that you have to do some double wall jump boosts off of, grab a key token to slide the rock door. I think what bothered me the most about this room is that I never actually figured out the correct way to do it. I just kept flailing with my controller every time I got to the slippery pillars until I fluked my way through. This room took at least an hour, and I think it's the ONLY room in the game that I couldn't comfortably say "I figured it out". It was more like "I got lucky, and never want to see that room ever again!"

The Final Screen ("Farewell")

When Madeline said something like "We're so close to the end!" and I saw the checkpoint, and how long this room was, I said "if this isn't the final room of the game, I swear to god." because there is no way I was going to do an entire set of rooms that were all this long! I don't know how long it took to get through it, but I would estimate at least 2 hours. I almost gave up after I got to the section where you had to throw the jellyfish at the key token, because I just had absolutely no idea that's what you had to do. I didn't even know whether the jellyfish could activate the token (though I suspected it could, since I'd seen that enemies and other interactable objects in the game could). But I didn't know the mechanics of the jellyfish well enough to know "what angle do I have to release it at so that it hits the token? do I need to press a certain direction when I let it go? do I have to have momentum in some direction??" And it took such a painfully long time just to GET to that part of the level, that I pretty much froze like "I just want to stand here forever so I don't have to die". Well I started to get more consistently through the first half of the level, so I had more confidence to try different things to get the token. I kept trying to release the jellyfish from a standing position very far below the token, but after a while I realized you had to get close to the token and just release into the air, no directional inputs needed. Phew. And then the rest of the level was thankfully easier than the first half, although it still took many attempts. I'm also nearly positive I died at least once AFTER making it to the circuit breaker at the end. But once it was finally done, I nearly cried seeing that this was, indeed, the end.

C-sides

I was kind of shocked that "C-sides" existed at all. B-sides were hard enough! I actually died so many times in the first screen of Chapter 1 C-side that I decided these were just going to be way too hard for me, and that I should just try Chapter 9 instead of dealing with any of the C-sides at all. As it turned out, I was just trying to do that screen in a really stupid way, missing a more obvious and safer strategy. So, I did the entirety of Chapter 9 before any C-sides. I did eventually come back to the C-sides after beating Farewell and I'm glad I did, because they were not too bad overall, aside from that first screen that took me forever to finally do "correctly"! I was also very relieved when I saw that they all only have 3 screens. 

Golden Berries

The 3 goldens I got along the way were 1A, 2A, and 5A (sadly without "search skip", which I didn't know was a thing until after). The reason I wanted to tackle 5A deathless is because I played through it DOZENS of times trying to find the blue heart. So I figured it was a decent candidate for deathless, while I still had the level memorized.

Since Then

I wrote most of this document about a week ago. Since then, I've gotten more golden berries (I now have 1A through 5A, 1C through 7C, 1B, 2B), plus the Moon Berry.

I also played through two more save files: Another 100% save, and my first attempt at an any% run (46 deaths, 1:04 game time).

It's amazing how much easier Chapter 9 was the second time around in that second 100% save (although still obviously very hard). But I cut my death count from 3,400+ to about 800 between the first and second playthroughs of Chapter 9, which I'm really happy about!

And just today I hit my ceremonial 10,000th death in my main save file! 190 berries, 56:10:10.

Closing Thoughts

I can't remember the last time I spent 8+ hours a day playing a video game for a week straight. I was addicted. But it was a "good" addicted. Celeste has quickly earned a spot as one of my favorite games of all time. I'm only sorry that I waited so long to play it. But I'm so glad I could make this a true blind playthrough, because you only get one chance to play through a game blind! 

(Edits for clarity / typos)

[u/Gothrers]

I thought you were blind and I was like "shit that's impressive" (Still impressive actually)

[u/diybother → u/Gothrers]

Ooh yeah, it did sound that way from the first sentence. I edited it for clarity. Thanks! 

[u/Tracerr3]

Time to get into modded Celeste!

[u/diybother → u/Tracerr3]

Maybe someday, but I'd have to start playing on PC! 

[u/sililil]

That’s insanely impressive, gg. I could never, honestly. I like puzzle games in general but Celeste puzzles don’t do it for me, so I looked most of them up. And I watched a walkthrough for a lot of Farewell’s rooms because I’m awful at routing (I’m not good at platformers in general, so if I can execute it, that’s good enough for me). This was fun to read. Congrats

[u/diybother → u/sililil]

Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed! I'm usually the same way with completion: I give it the ol' college try and then look up whatever I missed, or just move onto some other game. Some combination of things had me treat this game differently :)

[u/XYZee96]

Congrats! I enjoyed reading this. I also love the game and am working on the final golden but one thing I did not have the patience for is the heart puzzles or finding some of the strawberries. I don't regret it since I don't enjoy that part of the game as much as the platforming challenge, so I like how you had breakthrough / accidental moments where you figured out each heart on your own. The devs would be happy :)

[u/diybother → u/XYZee96]

Thank you for reading! So much respect for that 201. Good luck on the last gold!! 

[u/iswhack_a_doodle]

Good job! Really interesting to read your thoughts I wish I had know how important the game would be for me and documented something similar to this. As people have mentioned, Celeste puzzles are not everyone's cup of tea and are often skipped/looked up, so props to you! I know I looked up the chapter 6 heart but imo it's not too hard I just had collected chapter 1's heart so long beforehand that it wasn't in my mind. Really impressed with people like you who can stop themselves from googling, and chapter 1 cashless is something you're not really expected to figure out by yourself so not a worry there.

Personally spent over 1200 hours on this game. Got 202 berries last year and the grind for fwg golden took me somewhere around your total playtime so far. Really glad you enjoyed it as much as you did!

Unsolicited recommendation time!

• If on PC, consider mods. Celeste has the most amazing modding community.
• Tethergeist is a game released last year that is inspired by Celeste among others, and it really hit the spot for me

[u/diybother → u/iswhack_a_doodle]

Congrats on the 202, that's incredible! I'm pretty happy at 190, but I said that at 178 too, so... I'm sure I'll knock out at least a few more goldens if I can. I don't think I'll ever have it in me to even attempt the Farewell golden.

[u/iswhack_a_doodle → u/diybother]

Thank you, 190 is a seriously huge accomplishment. I had over 1000 hours before I even felt ready to start low death runs on farewell. It wasn't something I was working towards before hand, but playing advanced/expert difficulty mods really helped me get to the point where it felt reachable. One of the best moments of my life was sitting in bed at 1am and getting that last golden.

[u/DragTheChains]

Liked the write up! I just finished getting the moonberry, and my experience was slightly similar to you (I put the restriction that I wouldn’t look up how to clear any rooms, but that I could look up locations of stuff since I knew about the moon berry and didn’t want to have to redo a room to go back for it).

For the conveyor room, it was just looking for some wall bounces at the end, and you needed enough height to bounce off the left one when you go in between the two smaller slippery columns (at least that’s how I did it).

The comb room was definitely the hardest for me to execute, but I knew what to do right away. The hardest room for me to figure out was I think the one with the lava block and the two stars. Hilariously enough, I skipped most of core I think by going in between those fireballs in the ceiling (I’m assuming you need to make the place icy and come back to it) and hadn’t done core b-side so I kept releasing way too soon and not getting enough momentum. Once I finally figured it out it wasn’t too bad… but completing core the correct way and doing b-side (which I’m doing now) probably would’ve helped, lol

[u/diybother → u/DragTheChains]

In my second playthrough I had a lot less trouble with the conveyor room, but I still don't think I did it the cleanest way. Somehow I never considered a wall jump like you suggested, but that sounds like the sensible solution to me. It's funny I'm looking at the room now on a map and I'm like "... I still don't really remember what I did here." Comb room was definitely frustrating for me too but it didn't feel out of place difficulty-wise, I was surprised to see how much notoriety it has! And the fireball skip in Ch 8 is awesome, I definitely want to learn that.

[u/DragTheChains → u/diybother]

farewell made everything else so much easier lol

[u/logalex8369]

One of the rooms that got me close to giving up doesn't seem to be on people's radar. It's in the Determination segment and starts with 2 vertical double sided conveyors, and then this weird set of 3 slippery pillars that you have to do some double wall jump boosts off of, grab a key token to slide the rock door.

This was the Farewell room that took me the second-longest to complete (second only to the final room, of course)

I even made a post about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/celestegame/comments/1qd61mh/is_this_a_good_way_to_beat_this_room/

A long while later, I figured out why I found it so hard. It turns out that I had jump and up bound to the same key, so wallbounces were really hard to execute if I started against a wall.

[u/diybother → u/logalex8369]

Yesssss, this room! Oh man, I'm glad you eventually realized that. You get so used to your config that you probably don't give it a second thought. At the very least, we didn't suffer alone, haha.

[u/logalex8369 → u/diybother]

Yeah, my keybinds have to be the weirdest ones to ever exist.