Celeste: Farewell - Au Revoir

[Ditocoaf]

raocow, I think you'd really benefit by breaking that habit of "tapping the jump button once to jump, then holding it again to extend the jump". I think you have a lot of experience in games where that happens to work, but the usual theory of jumping is "press and hold the jump button, holding it longer for a bigger jump", all as one press. I think there've been a few cases now, where games are bad at 'showing you what you're doing wrong' because they don't expect anyone to do it your way.

I mean, I say this, but I know breaking a longstanding habit like that isn't always reasonable. Just something I've noticed!

[Holy]

This chapter is insane... raocow is very good at platforming. Big props to anyone with the guts to beat this.

[Sugar]

raocow, I think you'd really benefit by breaking that habit of "tapping the jump button once to jump, then holding it again to extend the jump". I think you have a lot of experience in games where that happens to work, but the usual theory of jumping is "press and hold the jump button, holding it longer for a bigger jump", all as one press. I think there've been a few cases now, where games are bad at 'showing you what you're doing wrong' because they don't expect anyone to do it your way.

I mean, I say this, but I know breaking a longstanding habit like that isn't always reasonable. Just something I've noticed!

As someone who plays of a lot of SMW, it's a hard habit to break, considering holding jump button in that game actually slows down the fall, allowing more control over jump arch, and in most games it's not an issue to do it.

[yoshicookiezeus]

Congratulations on finally making it past the cube room. I’m not entirely sure I’d call it the single hardest obstacle in the level, but I’m certainly having trouble coming up with one I personally found more difficult off the top of my head; the timing you need for those corner boosts off the moving cube is kind of ridiculous.

[Lord Ruby]

Yeah, I find doing boops from a state where you have a lot of horizontal speed (primarily wavedashing, but also the spring here) one of the most difficult things this game wants the player to do. There's a few pixels of leniency for being up against the wall, but even slight variations in speed can mess with the timing and the cue is visual, which just makes it feel pretty bad. And then this room is a particularly bad instance of it because it pairs it up with a moving wall.

Right now I'd say this is the room I recall being the second most difficult in the chapter. But I've already had a couple of instances of difficult rooms I had suppressed forgotten so far (including this one), so I don't consider my memories reliable enough to say that with confidence.

[ano0maly]

Regarding wavedashes and wall bounces,

the rest of Farewell does continue to use them, but the chapter doesn't have many spots where you're expected to chain one with the other, or to time them with a moving target.

Here's what I wrote in a review of Farewell about what people call the "comb room":

They were talking about how difficult it was to time the wavedash and then dash up and jump kick off the block that moves, so you need to match the position of the upward dash with the block and also have the correct timing so that the block is at a good spot.

When you retry, you appear directly below the right side of the block. I like to dash straight up (without jumping) to activate the block. And I think the thorn columns attached to the ceiling are there to help you measure the timing for your wavedash. I observed that you get a surprising amount of boost if you don't wall jump after the dash too soon. It's also a good reminder that the movement of the block will give you a boost in momentum even if it's not very fast.

About Assist Mode - I don't see why you need to revisit a particular room? I would picture it as using assist functions to make a particular room easier and then just continuing on with the game. But if you need to, Assist Mode has functions like

invincibility and infinite dashes & stamina

, so it should be pretty painless to get back to a room even when you can only enter a chapter at a few spots. (To enable Assist (or Variant) Mode, toggle it at the file select, and then in-game you can toggle its individual functions.)

[Donut]

If it makes raocow feel better, this screen feels like a huge aberration on the rest of the chapter, harder than everything that came before or after. It is the only screen I had to look up a video to get past in all of Celeste, and took me a similar amount of time even though I knew how to superjump. The good news is that because you got past this screen, you can definitely get past the rest.

[Ditocoaf]

raocow, I think you'd really benefit by breaking that habit of "tapping the jump button once to jump, then holding it again to extend the jump". I think you have a lot of experience in games where that happens to work, but the usual theory of jumping is "press and hold the jump button, holding it longer for a bigger jump", all as one press. I think there've been a few cases now, where games are bad at 'showing you what you're doing wrong' because they don't expect anyone to do it your way.

I mean, I say this, but I know breaking a longstanding habit like that isn't always reasonable. Just something I've noticed!

As someone who plays of a lot of SMW, it's a hard habit to break, considering holding jump button in that game actually slows down the fall, allowing more control over jump arch, and in most games it's not an issue to do it.

I can definitely understand habits being hard to break, but... I've always been confused by the "letting go" part of "letting go and re-pressing". Does SMW have some reason you'd want to release the jump button for the early part of a jump, instead of just keeping it held from the initial press?

[Ditocoaf]

About Assist Mode - I don't see why you need to revisit a particular room? I would picture it as using assist functions to make a particular room easier and then just continuing on with the game. But if you need to, Assist Mode has functions like

invincibility and infinite dashes & stamina

, so it should be pretty painless to get back to a room even when you can only enter a chapter at a few spots. (To enable Assist (or Variant) Mode, toggle it at the file select, and then in-game you can toggle its individual functions.)

I think he meant, if he finished the chapter, he'd be bothered by this one room he "skipped", and wish for a way to go back and fill it back in.

But yeah, like you're saying, you can always use assist mode to quickly get back TO any room you'd like.

[Sugar]

raocow, I think you'd really benefit by breaking that habit of "tapping the jump button once to jump, then holding it again to extend the jump". I think you have a lot of experience in games where that happens to work, but the usual theory of jumping is "press and hold the jump button, holding it longer for a bigger jump", all as one press. I think there've been a few cases now, where games are bad at 'showing you what you're doing wrong' because they don't expect anyone to do it your way.

I mean, I say this, but I know breaking a longstanding habit like that isn't always reasonable. Just something I've noticed!

As someone who plays of a lot of SMW, it's a hard habit to break, considering holding jump button in that game actually slows down the fall, allowing more control over jump arch, and in most games it's not an issue to do it.

I can definitely understand habits being hard to break, but... I've always been confused by the "letting go" part of "letting go and re-pressing". Does SMW have some reason you'd want to release the jump button for the early part of a jump, instead of just keeping it held from the initial press?

Jumping low while wanting to have slowest possible fall.

[Ditocoaf]

Jumping low while wanting to have slowest possible fall.

Ah yeah, now that you put it that way, I can picture tons of situations in romhacks where that's wanted.

[10204307]

I spent an embarrassingly long time on that stupid cloud room because I didn't realize you were supposed to dash under the cloud. In fact, I don't think I ever figured that out, I think I just got lucky at one point and managed to fast fall around it after bouncing off.

[BobisOnlyBob]

I spent an embarrassingly long time on that stupid cloud room because I didn't realize you were supposed to dash under the cloud. In fact, I don't think I ever figured that out, I think I just got lucky at one point and managed to fast fall around it after bouncing off.

A common strat is actually to diagonally dash into it iirc and slide off the right edge at its lowest point

[ano0maly]

So do you actually need fast fall in that large room with the feather chain?

There's one other room I can think of where fast fall would be useful - the vertical drop where you can choose left or right pathways and you dodge moving stars.

[10204307]

I can't see how you'd manage to make it down to the falling springs in time without fast falling, there's just no way to get there quick enough otherwise.

[Crow]

yeah you definitely have to fast-fall in that room.
there's also a room way towards the start of the level where fast falling helps though it's not 100% 100% required?

i don't think any other rooms in the level require fast falling

[yoshicookiezeus]

Huh, I guess today’s first room was made harder by some point. In the Switch version I just played, which is a slightly older version than the PC one, the first block doesn’t fall, so you can just keep returning to it after each key part. Also today I learned something new about the mechanics of this game: I had no idea you could cancel a flight by grabbing a wall like that. I did that part by doing a little loop at the start of the flight so that the feather would run out right before hitting the wall.

[Crow]

^that room originally looked like this, too:

[Ditocoaf]

It seems like the idea (to keep this zone visually interesting while still enabling ultimate freedom for abstract level design) was to have a clever, multifaceted theme: Are you in space on the moon? No, you're under the sea, with microscopic organisms. But it's digital!

And... I really like that, it's a neat point of ambiguity which I could totally see holding up a compelling world design. But then, within that world, there's no sense of progression or differentiation. At the beginning of the B side, the computer-y aspect was added and the background changed to to the maw of the void. On either side of that divide, each room looks like each other room. (Mechanically, too: it rarely feels like the rooms have any reason to be in the order that they're in, other than the jellyfish and wavedash tutorials -- the rooms just kinda jump from one idea to another without building on each other.) You could play most of this on "shuffle" and not notice.

[Crow]

we are literally two screens away from an aesthetic change hold your horses y'all

[Ditocoaf]

we are literally two screens away from an aesthetic change hold your horses y'all

I mean, I acknowledged that there was already an aesthetic change at the start of the B-side section. I'm expecting another change to mark the start of the C-side, that maintains what I was saying in my post.

(I'm also expecting that change to be pretty dang cool, and probably surprise me somehow! I'm genuinely looking forward to it.)

It's the difference between one big change, and more frequent smaller differences -- the "all at once" approach is successfully making each side feel different, but within each side it doesn't feel like you're progressing from room to room.

[Crow]

the glitchy segment has only been going on for what counts as "two sections" of the eight sections in the level, fwiw, but yeah it is the longest stretch of the level

[ano0maly]

This is the music that plays in the color blocks section:




In the game, the chimes are separate from the BGM. In past chapters, the blocks follow the rhythm of the beats, which are synchronized with the music, so you can listen to the BGM to get more of the feel for the timing. Here though, the BGM was made to be an ambient theme that's simple, quiet, and continuous, so as to not interfere with the chimes that the players would be listening to.

It looks like the game took a different approach here because there are up to four colors and the chime rate varies.

This is why everything pauses in previous block sections when you pause the game, but here the music (and not the chimes) keeps playing.

[Crow]

tomorrow:

the real real REAL celeste starts here!

[ano0maly]

Two videos today alert !!