A platformer about a young woman climbing a mountain while a purple version of herself argues she should stop, released in January 2018 and grown from a four-day Pico-8 jam game. It became the year's indie darling, and an Assist Mode that let players slow the game down started an argument about difficulty that has not ended.
Correction: Celeste Classic, the Pico-8 version from 2015, is not a demo of the full game. It is a separate game, playable inside the real one from a computer in the third chapter, and is still on the Pico-8 site.
The record notes that the death counter is shown and encouraged, that the strawberries do nothing, and that the final chapter added in 2019, Farewell, is harder than everything before it combined.
I remember the dash-refill feathers and giving up on the B-side of the second level, and coming back to it three years later with Assist Mode on and no shame at all.
The Game Awards, December 2018: a small Canadian team accepting the award for best independent game, and Twitter noting that a game about anxiety had won during a year that needed one.
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