A year ago, the Nintendo Switch looked like a Hail Mary from a legacy game company that desperately needed a win. A hybrid machine—part living-room console, part handheld— that turned the Wii U’s kinda-portability into a success? Well, it could work...maybe.
Now, of course, the Switch feels like an inevitability. It has already outsold the lifetime sales of the Wii U, and is on pace to match up with the runaway, culture-redefining success of the Wii. Nintendo's latest console was a juggernaut in its first year, largely by becoming precisely what many analysts (including me) suggested it needed to be: a system that buoyed a series of excellent first-party titles with a healthy diet of indie games and ports. Which raises the question: where does Nintendo go from here?
The answer? More games like Celeste.
Celeste, out this week simultaneously on PlayStation 4, PC, and the Nintendo Switch, is a retro-styled 2D platformer about climbing mountain ruins. It's also more than that: it's a lush, warm story of a girl challenging herself and winning. It's one of the best feeling, and best sounding platformers I've played in a long time, invigorating and clever. Each screen is a small puzzle of acrobatic routing, offering easy and difficult paths through the environment, allowing the player to challenge herself or just move on.
