TowerFall follow-up Celeste launches on PC and consoles later this month

Celeste, the latest game from TowerFall Ascension designer Matt Thorson, will release on Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and PC, on January 25th.

Celeste is a narrative-driven, single-player adventure, described as a "super-tight, hand-crafted platformer". It casts you as protagonist Madeline, and sends you climbing upward, through 600 single-screen stages, toward the summit of the mysterious, titular mountain.

Celeste sports a gorgeous, lo-fi pixel art aesthetic, similar to its superb predecessor; but where TowerFall was a chaotic couch-based multiplayer affair, Celeste is a strictly single-player experience, mixing cerebral traversal challenges with the kind of tough, twitch-based platforming seen in the likes of Super Meat Boy.

Celeste started life as a small-scale entry for the second PICO-8 game jam (the theme was 'chain reaction', if you're wondering), and that original version is still available to play online. The full version due out at the end of the month is a substantially richer, expanded offering.

When Jeffrey Matulef gave Celeste a whirl early last year on Switch, he called it a "pure, unadulterated distillation of the joys of platforming".