#now back to what i was playing beforehand... crosscode. oh jesus christ

[lividria]

Funny Story: Celeste

So, I've mentioned in a couple previous posts that I'm transfem, right? Well, one time, another trans girl joined a Discord I'm in, and I don't remember what led up to it, but they had DMed me asking if I had played Celeste, saying that they "thought you had to play it to be trans"? They then said that was a joke and said some other stuff I forgot and I'm too lazy to find the exchange, but the entire thing was weird, alienating and uncomfortable, and it's stuck with me ever since because of it, even if that person basically never said anything ever again anywhere after that.

So, last night, when I was looking on the XBox Game Pass because I apparently misremembered Shovel Knight as being on there and wanting to try that only to be disappointed, I stumble upon Celeste... And I figured, why the hell not perform the apparent rite of passage? I've already embraced the double jump joke. So I did it tonight, since I had a few hours.

If this is the game you have to have played to be trans, then I am terrified of what every other trans person is capable of, because this game beat my ass HARD. I joke about being bad at video games, some of my friends tease me for being bad at video games, but I don't think I've ever been hit this badly. I had to use Assist Mode basically the whole way through, and I died like 93 times on Chapter 1. I later died 100+ times to Chapter 3 too, and by the end had racked up 387 total. This is probably the most infuriating gameplay I've ever experienced, besides for maybe that one stupid Sonic Frontiers minigame with herding the rock Chao, that's probably still worse, actually. Even with infinite dashes and invincibility (Though I only turned that on at Chapter 5), I was getting kicked around left and right.

My main takeaway from the game besides the confirmation that I'm not a masochist is that there's probably an issue with myself I need to address if the only character I didn't find unlikable for most of the game and the only reasonable one of the cast was Badeline, the literal manifestation of self-doubt and anxiety. The entire time I was basically saying to the screen that she was right. That's probably not a good thing.