In order to access Chapter 8 of Celeste, the Core, you need some hearts.
There are two different ways to acquire these hearts so far in the game. Both of them require secrets, though one is more obscure than the other. Within the main game you can either acquire Crystal Hearts or Red Hearts. Crystal Hearts are found by understanding the game and breaking its rules, albeit in a permitted way. The Red Hearts are achieved after unlocking secret harder versions of the levels (B-sides), but are less obscure. In essence, in order to continue to game, you either need to 1. Prove that you understand that the game has secrets or 2. Prove that you are really, really good at Celeste.
When reading “Act Natural” I thought about these hearts as an evolution of the original “Easter Egg” concept popularized by Atari. Collecting these hearts does not give Madeline special abilities or new movesets, but instead acts as an indicator in the conversation the player has with the developers. The best crystal heart puzzle in Celeste is in chapter 2, where the heart is only accessible by exploiting how Madeline’s dash resets in between screens. (You can watch how that works here: https://youtu.be/aHyK1mhSm7s?si=3NIsMCmYLLqE72ll)
By including hearts in order to progress the game, instead of the more obvious collectible (strawberries), Celeste dares the player to play multiple games on top of the initial platforming challenge. If a player encounters the heart gate before collecting a single one, it posits a question: What are these items? Why have I never seen them before? How can I get them? Celeste harkens back to a retro-style of replayability, where a simple platforming game like Mario actually hides a series of inside jokes between the developer and the audience. In that way, it’s almost parasocial. When I found hidden secrets in Celeste, I would almost laugh to myself because it felt as though the developers set up a punchline and I found it. Now you’re in on the joke, but it’s not really a joke. Now you’re in on a new game. That’s why the feeling of lightness that was described in the reading really resonated with me, especially when relating to games like Celeste and Animal Well.
Furthermore, the crystal hearts are a specifically knowledge-gated challenge. Knowledge rather than skill or muscle memory is what defines the role-playing within Celeste compared to the rest of the game. When you start to play a puzzle in the game, when you draw symbols representing directions of different birds and their sequences, then you are effectively no longer Madeline, the rock climber. You are now the player, a puzzle solver. The game is playing with your instinct to break, to squish the bounds of the games’ physics. If you can successfully exploit how Madeline recovers her dash and can bounce quickly (wavedash) in Chapter 9, you don’t need more crystal hearts. You have proven yourself as someone who is *in the know* when it comes to the game. (See this wavedash skip here: https://youtu.be/gM-2SDyIEV0?t=100) Part of the fun of replayability in this game is that you can switch between roles that you play. Most players will play the game the first run as Madeline, exploring her story and trying to climb the basic chapters so that she can go on with her emotional story. But once that run is done, different roles emerge that one can play. You can roleplay as an obsessed strawberry collector, someone who wants to perfect every exploit from the base moveset, or someone who just wants to solve the knowledge based puzzles. Secrets in games push you into different roles, creating different affective modes when playing.
Citations:
Macdonald, Peter. “Act Natural: From Therapeutic Roleplay to Super Mario World.” The Impossible Reversal: The History of How We Play. University of Minnesota Press, 2026.
Image from the core is from: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/326937/how-do-i-open-the-blue-gate-in-chapter-8-core
Youtube videos of gameplay are linked in the text 🙂
