Celeste Sequel (Probably) Won’t Happen, Developer Says

Spoiler warning! We’ve kept this article entirely free of spoilers for Chapter 9, but the full interview below it does discuss some mechanics spoilers. They are clearly marked as such, but keep that in mind if you want to enter Chapter 9 entirely fresh!

On Monday, Celeste will get a free update that adds a brand new chapter called Farewell, and that title could be a goodbye to Celeste

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— Matt Thorson (@MattThorson) February 21, 2019

Celeste has found incredible success since its launch in January 2018, with Thorson telling me it’s currently approaching a million copies sold (a feat they called “unbelievable”). They said that good fortune has “really given us space to create on our own terms for the near future.” It’s also allowed them to do things like release Chapter 9 for free, something that’s awesome for fans but Thorson admits is “crazy” to even be possible.

“First of all, we really should be charging for it,” Thorson said, explaining that they “don’t like setting expectations that expansions of this size should be free.” For reference, Chapter 9 brings Celeste’s total amount of levels to over 800, adding more than 100 new ones all on its own that have new mechanics, story, art, music, and more on display.

But Thorson is also talking about more than just Celeste here. “We want to be clear to our audience that we’re only able to release this for free because we’re in a very fortunate position right now, and that this really isn’t a reasonable thing to expect from any developer, including us, in the future.”

They explained that providing Chapter 9 for free was ultimately a design decision, as charging for it would “force us to approach it as a new ‘product’, which would constrain us in some ways that didn’t feel right.” But Thorson’s stance on the value of development time is an important one, especially as games get cheaper (or flat out free) across the board and developers are often expected to keep them alive forever with free updates like this.

“When we released Celeste, we honestly felt like we had tapped the well dry,” Thorson said. “Of course that’s never actually true, but we worked so hard for so long that we reached our limit. After some rest and time away, the ideas began to flow again.” Every idea in Chapter 9 is brand new – some resulted from experimentation with old mechanics, some were thought up fresh, and one was even inspired by the work of custom level modders in the community. (More spoiler-filled details on those mechanics in the full interview below.)

Because the base game’s success provided them with “some time to tinker,” the Celeste team let what was planned to be a quick update with no story content grow in scope. In addition to this, Thorson also told me that one of the reasons Chapter 9 took longer than expected was that the team was splitting their time between it and their next project. “We were also busy setting up EXOK (our new game studio) and immigrating our team to Canada.”

So it’s unlikely Celeste will get another update like this (at least any time soon), and a sequel isn’t in the cards for the foreseeable future either. We’ll have a hands-on preview of Chapter 9 to read tomorrow though, and frankly, I’m excited as hell to hear that the minds behind it (and Towerfall, another absolute favorite of mine) are working on something totally new.

Thorson said the team’s next game is “not ready to be revealed yet so for now we want to ask everyone to be patient,” but their new studio, EXOK, is currently taking sign-ups for a newsletter that will be sharing behind-the-scenes updates.

You can read our full interview where Thorson goes into detail on some of the design decisions behind Chapter 9’s story and new mechanics below. That said, a couple of the answers have spoilers for what you’ll see in the new chapter, specifically those in the large blue box – avoid those answers if you want to play Farewell blind!

Full Interview With Celeste Developer Matt Thorson:

IGN: It’s been nearly two years since Celeste came out, why add Chapter 9 to it so much later?

Matt Thorson: We knew a few months after release that we wanted to add some more levels, but we ended up taking a very long break after Celeste launched. Once we got back to work we planned for it to be a quick update, but obviously that didn’t happen hah. The scope grew and it felt like, why not let it grow a bit. Why not let it become more, since we have time to tinker.

Did you feel Celeste’s story wasn’t truly finished, or is this sort of a new semi-contained story?

We definitely see the base story of Celeste as “finished,” in the sense that it resolves and says what we wanted it to say. That said, one of our goals with Chapter 9 was to make something that felt like a natural piece of the game. For fans, we want it to feel fresh and exciting, but in a few months when it’s old news we want this new piece to feel like it could have always been a part of the puzzle, if that makes sense. It plays with the themes of the base game and takes them in a new direction, but ties itself back to what Celeste has always been about, I think.

What part of Madeline’s story did you feel you still needed to tell?

One thing we tried to communicate in Chapter 7 that might have been missed by some players, is that climbing the mountain was not the end of all of Madeline’s problems. It was a breakthrough for her, but it doesn’t make sense to think of it as “happily ever after.” Chapter 9 gave us a chance to show how tempting those old, destructive patterns can still be for Madeline in hard times, and how her newfound relationship with her “dark side” can help her dig herself out of that headspace.

This tweet from developer Noel Berry indicates that this update may have taken a little longer than you expected, why was that? Did the scope grow or was it just hard to return to Celeste?

Originally, we wanted to keep it small and to avoid doing story stuff so that we could finish it quickly and start on our next project sooner. Just like the base game, Chapter 9 wanted to be much bigger than we planned it to be. And in the meantime, we were also busy setting up EXOK (our new game studio) and immigrating our team to Canada. In the latter half of development, some of us were splitting our time between Celeste Chapter 9 and our next game, which slowed it down too.

What sort of lessons did you learn from the feedback you got after launch? Anything you did differently with Chapter 9 as a result?

One reason why we love doing post-release content is because players give us a whole new perspective on our work. When you’re working on a game for years in near-isolation you have an understanding of what you love about it, but putting any kind of art out into the world gives it a much more vibrant life. Suddenly, Celeste was much more than we understood it to be. It’s tempting to take that and revisit the creative space one more time. It’s difficult to say exactly how this affected us, but all of the million tiny decisions that go into the process are influenced by it.

Why not charge for this update as DLC, or just hold off and make Celeste 2? (If you are even considering it!)

First of all, we really should be charging for it. We don’t like setting expectations that expansions of this size should be free. We want to be clear to our audience that we’re only able to release this for free because we’re in a very fortunate position right now, and that this really isn’t a reasonable thing to expect from any developer, including us, in the future.

Early on we decided that charging for Chapter 9 would force us to approach it as a new “product,” which would constrain us in some ways that didn’t feel right. There’s some design decisions that would’ve had to change. So it was just the best decision for the project, and we’re very grateful to be in the position where we could do it this way.

And as for Celeste 2, we really don’t want to make a sequel to this game. Maybe in the future we’ll change our minds, but right now we don’t know how we’d do a sequel justice. And besides, we’re way more interested in making something new for our next full release.

How many copies has Celeste sold to date?

I don’t have an exact up-to-date number, but I know we’re coming up on a million copies soon. Which is unbelievable to us.

You touched on this a little already, but do you feel its success has given you some breathing room to get creative and take your time with stuff like this?

Absolutely. It’s really given us space to create on our own terms for the near future. It’s crazy that we don’t have to charge money for Chapter 9, for example. And it’s amazing that we have the time and resources to form our new studio and get everyone working together in one office. That’ll make our next project go a lot smoother.

Anything you can share about what’s next?

Well we have our new studio EXOK, which will be the home for all of our future developments. We have a newsletter for it that I want to encourage people to sign up for, because we’re trying to keep that updated with behind-the-scenes stuff pretty frequently, and we’d love to build a community around it. As for our next game, we’ve been working on it for a while. Now that Celeste Chapter 9 is out, we’re all chipping away at it every day. It’s not ready to be revealed yet, so for now we want to ask everyone to be patient 🙂

This interview has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

Tom Marks is IGN’s Deputy Reviews Editor and resident pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter.