Celeste in the EFL classroom
There will be heavy spoilers during this review. So be warned.
Celeste is a 2018 video game developed by Maddy Thorson and published by Maddy Makes Games. The game is a 2D platformer and received broad critical acclaim. It has a score of 92/100 on Metacritic, making it one of the highest-rated indie games. The goal of the game seems simple: players control Madeline, a young woman whose goal is to climb the challenging Celeste Mountain. But as she climbs higher, the mountain becomes a mirror for her inner self. We learn that Madeline is fighting internal struggles such as panic attacks, depression, and anxiety, which we, as the player, experience with her while playing.
Celeste as „Crip Literature“ and an „Own Voices“ Text
I want to review Celeste, not just as an entertainment product, but as a deeply moving piece of „crip literature“.
First, what makes Celeste an „own voices“ text? The game’s creator, Maddy Thorson, openly spoke about how, while writing Madeline’s journey, she was processing her own real-life struggles with anxiety, depression, and identity. Thorson herself is transgender and Celeste got a free add-on in 2019 called Farewell, in which we see that Madeline has both a trans flag and a pride flag at her desk towards the end of the game. Thorson later shared in a blog post that when she wrote the base game, she still believed she was cisgender, but was, in her own words, ““”waist-deep in gender feelin“g”s“. Developing the game helped her understand her own identity.
Challenging Traditional Narratives
In traditional literature, disability and mental illness are often discussed from a „searching for a cure“ angle. A character is broken, they fight their inner demons, they get cured and they become „normal“. Celeste does not reflect this kind of storytelling. Towards the beginning of the game, Madeline’s anxiety materializes as a purple-haired alter-ego who emerges from a mirror. Her name is Badeline, also referred to as „Part of Me“.
Badeline haunts Madeline and attempts to convince her to turn back and stop climbing the mountain and at first, Madeline tries to fight Badeline and runs away from her. But the turning point of the narrative is that Madeline cannot reach the top of the mountain by defeating her anxiety. She reaches it by having a conversation with her, listening to her, apologizing to her, and cooperating with her. They literally fuse together into a single character in order to climb the final, hardest stretch of the mountain. The narrative therefore does not follow the idea that a neurodivergent person needs to be „fixed“ in order to achieve great things. Instead, it celebrates self-acceptance and reflection.
Potential in the EFL classroom
Celeste is notoriously hard to play. It requires extreme precision and a high tolerance for failure, which can be interpreted as an insight into Madeline’s life. However, after each failed attempt, players only need a few moments before returning to where they just were. There are no lives to lose and no major setbacks in progression. This raises the question of whether or not a game with such a high difficulty level should be incorporated into the classroom. Celeste fits well into secondary schools, specifically higher grades. Mental health is becoming an increasingly important topic in education and Celeste builds a bridge between digital media literacy and cultural learning.
The game is also accessible for English foreign language learners. The dialogue is entirely text-based and quite minimal. There is no traditional voice acting; instead, the game uses expressive, electronic gibberish sounds, which gives students insight into the emotions and atmosphere conveyed alongside the text. Based on the game’s dialogue, the language appears to be accessible for students around the A2 to B1 level of English proficiency. As a result, students are less likely to spend their time struggling with individual words and can instead focus their attention on analyzing and discussing the deeper themes of the game.
Approaches for the classroom
How could teachers integrate Celeste without requiring a classroom full of gaming computers and 20 to 30 hours of time? They would need to use alternative ways to approach the game. I designed hypothetical tasks in order to show possible ways of implementing the game.
Option 1: Multimodal Analysis
Students watch a short video clip of Chapter 4, which is called The Golden Ridge. In this scene, Madeline suffers a severe panic attack while she is trapped on a moving gondola. Her friend Theo tells her to visualize a feather floating in the air. He tells her to breathe in and out steadily to keep the feather in the air. The game slows down the gameplay and makes the player do this breathing exercise to calm Madeline down. The sequence is beautifully made as it connects the player with Madeline on an emotional level.
Visually and musically, the colors and tones reflect the mood of the game. As the player is watching a gorgeous sunset filled with orange-red colors (matching Madeline’s hair), the screen drastically shifts into dark purple and black tones (mirroring Badeline’s hair). The music gets hectic in an otherwise beautiful setting. As a task, students can analyze the multimodality of this scene. How do the changing colors, the suspenseful music and the sudden shift in pace simulate the feeling of a panic attack? How would you evaluate Theo’s reaction and support?
Option 2: Creative Writing
In this task, students craft a diary entry from Madeline’s perspective immediately after getting off the gondola. This activity aims to encourage perspective-taking and empathy towards Madeline. For task-support teachers can provide emotion-vocabulary or sentence starters.
Option 3: Classroom Debate
Teachers host a classroom debate talking about whether or not video games are a more effective medium for building empathy regarding mental health than printed text-based literature. This leads to students practicing their language in discourse, using conversational strategies and bringing together everything they’ve learned about Celeste as an art form as well as issues of mental health. This requires learners to have a basic understanding of discourse-strategies and prior knowledge of mental health topics.
Inclusive Game Design as a metaphor
What makes analyzing Celeste’s accessibility even more interesting is looking at how the game design itself is inclusive, even though the game is quite hard. It has an assist mode which offers several choices the player can make for themselves, such as lowering the game speed or giving Madeline infinite stamina. But even in the base game, Celeste uses several mechanics that work in favor of the player. For example, it utilizes „coyote time“, a design choice which gives players a period in which they can still jump, even after visually leaving the edge of a floor. Maybe the high difficulty was a deliberate choice to serve as an analogy for Madeline’s internal struggles.
Conclusion
Celeste tells players that struggling with your mental health doesn’t mean you are incapable of reaching massive heights. It just means you have to learn how to get through the rough parts and how to carry your whole self (even the parts you want to lose) with you along the way. It is authentic, it is visually and musically stunning and it deserves a place not only in gaming recommendation lists but also in an inclusive EFL classroom.
Thank you for reading my text review on Celeste. Please take some more time and listen to the soundtrack of Celeste as it’s not only beautiful to listen to but also reflects the journey one has with the game.
This is it, Madeline. Just breathe. You can do this.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 N. Wawak (2026) Celeste in the EFL classroom