Cross stitch pattern of the mountain from Celeste. This one was specially requested by one of my Patrons so head over there to download the PDF and PNG files. I also take custom requests from my Patrons so if you have something in mind let me know.

Grid Size: 100W x 60H
Design Area: 7.14″ x 4.29″ (100 x 60 stitches)
Colors:17

My Patron, Emma Callau, is a sand cat who can cast illusion magic. All sand cats can do it, but Emma’s family are particularly good at looking like humans so they can go into towns and get things that other cats would have trouble finding.

I want to take some time to talk about Assist Mode. It’s basically a customizable difficulty setting in Celeste where you can do things like adjust the speed of the game or even turn on god mode. There are a lot of people who would say that this breaks the game, but I am firmly in the other camp.

Celeste’s version of Assist Mode is something that I want to see in almost every game. It is by far better than almost every other easy mode I’ve played and I love easy modes. I mean, I’m the one who played Fallout 4 with the Clean Water mod on the whole time. Yeah it makes the Aquagirl/boy perk useless, but radiation is annoying. The good thing with Celeste is that Assist Mode is clear about what I’m doing and lets me customize my experience.

I want to contrast this with Assist Mode in Mario Odyssey. In that game, you can switch to Assist Mode at any time, but it doesn’t tell you what it does. And some of the changes are really obscure like lengthening the time a Gushen can use its water by four seconds. Who’s going to find that without looking it up? And you can’t change perks one at a time either. Like, I would enjoy the mechanic that lets you take a hit instead of falling off a cliff. Maybe I would turn on the extra hit points, but I definitely don’t need to be able to breathe underwater or objective markers.

Celeste gives you the ability to tailor the gameplay experience to fit your needs and I just can’t encourage that kind of flexibility enough. I know there have been games I’ve played that I’ve put down and never finished just because one section was too frustrating.  As I get older, I have less and less patience for instant death mechanics or huge distances between checkpoints, and even less patience for games that don’t let me save right before a boss battle. I just want to see the story. I want to explore the game world and bounce around for a while. I spent the most time in New Donk City because there weren’t any enemies and I could relax a little.

That’s what easy modes do, they let me relax, and being able to tailor that experience is so important to me.