Celeste Classic is now available on Playdate!

After five months of work as a side-project, I am delighted to release a full port of Celeste Classic from PICO-8 to the Playdate, the little yellow handheld with a crank from Panic.

Celeste Classic on Playdate was made to be as faithful as possible to the original game on PICO-8. But here are a few notable changes:

• The game is in black and white only. A lot of visual elements have an outline to make them more readable. But this does not impact their original hitbox.
• The game is rendered at 256×240 from the original 128×128. Four pixel lines are cropped at the top and bottom of the screen. The game can be played at its original resolution by disabling the Fullscreen option available in the game’s menu.
• Assist mode is available under the game’s menu. This allows player to skip a level, change the game speed to 0.5×, get infinite dashes, and enable invincibility. If assist mode is used during a run, a mention is added on each level in the lower right corner, as well as in the pause screen and the final score screen.

Here are a few side-by-side comparisons of the original game on PICO-8 and its 1-bit port on Playdate.

This was a delightful project to work on and I learned so much about Celeste, PICO-8 and Playdate development. I hope Playdate gamers will enjoy it as much as the original!