Chasing the Strawberry: The Forbidden Fruit of the Masochistic Platformer

Platformers.  So simple in their design.  Run, jump, maybe die?  Die.  Try again until you don't die.  These are the simple tenets of the platformer.  Yet, platformers can also be some of the most wickedly designed games out there.  You might be lulled into a false sense of security as you breeze through the first few levels but then suddenly, the level design maliciously changes on you introducing jumps you can't make the first try and hazards you never knew existed. You're starting to become familiar with that one worded question: Continue?  You can't turn down a challenge, can you?

Some platformers take challenging gameplay to a whole other level.  Games like N+ and Super Meat Boy are so crushingly difficult that there's got to be some kind of subgenre to describe them.  Whatever that may be, I'm just going to call them masochistic platformers.  These are the games that don't just challenge your skill level, they challenge your patience and mental stability.  Normal gamers give up on a game after about ten to 15 deaths in a row (ok, I pulled that statistic out of my ass), but gamers who continue to truck on after countless death are a special breed.  They're the ones who enjoy the frustration.  They enjoy the pain.  They won't stop until they beat that level that no one else in the world but them cares about beating.  Once they do, they get a special kind of elation from overcoming the challenge.  These gamers are masochists, and I'm one of them. So hence, "masochistic platformer".

Don't do it Madeline!  It's a trap!

I'm currently playing through Celeste right now.  Celeste is exactly the kind of game I'm describing when I say masochistic platformer.  It has that same "jump precisely or die" gameplay that everyone loved in Super Meat Boy, but it adds a few other gameplay elements to it, such as an eight-way directional boost and the ability to climb.  You'd think that would make the game easier than Super Meat Boy, right?

Well, I suppose if you just ignore the strawberries, then yeah, maybe it's not so bad.  But on to the topic of the blog: chasing the strawberry.  In Celeste, there are floating strawberries that are placed in precarious places that only serve one purpose: they want you to die collecting them. How it works in Celeste is that once you managed to get the strawberry, you have to return to terra firma where it's safe before it counts as you collecting.  This means you can't just run and jump to it and then die with it collected.  Nope, you have to do a full circle.  Also, some of the strawberries have wings and when you boost anywhere on the screen, they take off.  This makes the path to them even more hazardous because you can't use the boost if you hope to reach them.

See that strawberry up there?  That's just one of the easier ones.

The game expects you to die.  A lot.  So much so that it keeps track of your deaths at the end of every chapter.  In fact, during one loading screen, it even tells you to take pride in your high death count because that means you're learning.  But ... are you REALLY learning?  Anyway, when I reach the end of chapter three, I expect my death count to be in the hundreds.  It's all due to these damned strawberries!  There's really no point to them.  They don't bequeath XP; they don't give you special powers; they do absolutely nothing except give you a thousand points at the cost of a thousand deaths.  This isn't really a game I see people playing for points anyway, though.  Also, the game actually tells you in a loading screen that the strawberries do nothing but "impress your friends."

I probably could have been a lot farther along in Celeste has it not been for wasting so much time trying to collect every strawberry I saw, but they're just too tempting for some reason.  They seriously are forbidden fruit.  I'm not supposed to partake, but I will risk many lives in order to do so.  And these kinds of collectibles exist in many platformers.  They entice you above the edge of cliffs.  They beckon you between two massive saw blades.  They lure you in like sirens eagerly awaiting your battered remains to be sploshed among the jagged rocks of the cove.  And we masochistic gamers come back for more, again and again and again, because there is no sweeter fruit than the forbidden variety.