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What is this? 2018? Yeah, do you really need me to tell you that Celeste is good?
No, you probably don’t.
But here’s what made me write this anyway: Dungeons of Hinterberg, Tunic, Elden Ring, and, of course, Dark Souls. All of these are games I’ve been playing over the last couple months (as well as Rain World and Hollow Knight – there might be a theme here). I went back and finished Tunic, started a new run of Elden Ring, tried out Dungeons of Hinterberg, and finally found myself playing a new run of Dark Souls. Over the course of this journey, I found myself repeatedly coming back to two main points of comparison: the tutorial section and the game’s overall challenge.
Dark Souls’ difficulty is established enough to be almost tautological. At the same time, I’ve found myself commenting that “Dark Souls isn’t actually that hard” unironically. The split here, I think, goes back to my original article on challenge and difficulty: Dark Souls requires you to learn a specific set of skills, and then constantly asks you to demonstrate your ability at manipulating those skills – not perfectly, but constantly. This is what makes Dark Souls challenging, rather than difficult.
What makes the majority of people bounce off of Dark Souls initially (before they get the stamina management and dodging/blocking system engraved on their souls… heh) is the lack of – or perhaps simply the arcane – tutorialization. To be fair, the fighting system of the Souls-likes is something you simply have to learn for yourself – it’s not something that comes naturally nor is it one that can be explained in short blocks of text on the screen. Indeed, perhaps the only way to learn it is to have enemies which will chunk off huge portions of your health if you try attack-spamming your way through. But because of that – because there isn’t a tutorial that can instill that – many players bounce off of Dark Souls as “too hard.”
The opposite problem is found in Dungeons of Hinterberg (and, yes, Hi-Fi Rush): a tutorial which will bash your head in with game mechanics and how to properly play the game, completely interrupting the flow and attempting to ensure that no player will be left behind. See above, where the game not only locks you in a room until you figure out that the bomb skill you just learned can be used to blow up rocks, but also grabs the camera and pans it to show you exactly what they mean while talking about your new skill. The trouble with going this direction for a tutorial is that a segment of your player base (a large segment, I would argue) might find the idea that you could use a bomb to blow up a rock wall to be … fairly obvious … and thus subjects the player who knows this to a boring conversation and robs the player who did not of the opportunity to figure it out themselves.
So what makes a good tutorial? To start with, I believe you have to ride the line between letting the player figure things out for themselves while telling them enough to be fairly sure they will figure it out. For the curmudgeons like me, the tutorial should rely on as little fourth wall-breaking as possible (although – likely because guessing buttons on a keyboard is more difficult than guessing buttons on a controller – a big picture with all the buttons also doesn’t bother me personally as long as the number of controls to learn is easy to internalize all at once) and ideally will diagetically teach the player by presenting challenges that can only be overcome by experimenting with and learning the mechanics. Earlier small challenges can let the player figure out the mechanics, then the game can introduce more difficult and varied complications as the game progresses. And let’s not forget that the tutorial should never yank control away (or require long conversations) multiple times in short succession, and it should be as invisible as possible to returning players. Easy, right?
That brings us, finally, to Celeste. Now, Celeste does yank away your control to tell you how to do things…once. At a thematically appropriate moment, to tell you one thing using a grand total of two emoji. But after that? You’re free to go in whatever direction you want, however you want. Because resets happen quickly (an important component of this style of tutorialization), you can experiment and learn how each new component works easily and in a simple environment before being challenged later on. Though writing all this makes me realize that the reason I didn’t write this article before is probably because this is just the Sequelitis – Mega Man video essay with different words. Indeed, you could probably swap “Celeste” with “Mega Man” or “Super Mario Bros.” and get pretty much the same result.
Here I must admit my own failings – I’m terrible at 2D platformers (probably partly because I didn’t grow up on them and partly because my reaction skills are nonexistent). That, combined with my own stubbornness, led me to burn out on Celeste while trying to collect all the raspberries three chapters in. The difficulty ramp on Celeste (at least the A sides) is not so dissimilar from Hollow Knight or any other modern “difficult” platformer – I just lack the skills to handle it. This – of course – is not a failure of Celeste, and, indeed, the excellent tutorialization continues even as the difficulty ramps. The opening hour of Celeste literally laughs in your face through its story but still inspires you to conquer its challenges through its mechanics.
Aside: Dark Souls and Outer Wilds
This, I think, is what makes Dark Souls’ first-time experience so likely to scare away new players. While the world of Celeste is divvyed up into screens which you can conquer one at a time and get short bursts of pleasure each time you succeed, Dark Souls is divvyed up by bonfire (and famously has very little obvious storytelling). Though bonfires are not so far apart for the player who has gotten used to being blatted in the face with a rake, I think Dark Souls (and here I am referring to all Souls titles) fails to inspire the same level of satisfaction as Celeste does from conquering its mini-challenges. Part of this is due to its nature as a 3D game that is trying to represent a “realistic” world, part of this is the almost complete lack of explicit explanation for why you should care about the world, and part of this is simply that I’m simply not sure how you could tutorialize the rhythm of combat without teaching bad habits that would need to be forgotten later.
But tutorializing a 3D world certainly isn’t impossible, and we need look no further than Outer Wilds or Super Mario 64 to see why. Outer Wilds is practically nothing but one long tutorial section, and the lessons it teaches on tutorials are perhaps the greatest I’ve ever seen collected into one place for 3D worlds. It exemplifies several additional principles for tutorials.
First, we see that accomplishments are rewarded quickly and inspire you to take on further challenges: in Outer Wilds will have lore and clues to other locations or mechanics no matter what interesting thing you head towards, and in Super Mario 64 you will find yourself stumbling over stars while learning a new stage.
Failure is never a huge setback: it’s always quick to get back to what you are doing in either game, and in Outer Wilds it’s a baked-in mechanic that you’ll be returning to the same places again and again. This is just as important in a more mechanically challenging game – Celeste is much more difficult to beat, but you are given ample chances to retry. Super Mario 64 has a life system, but it is entirely vestigial at that point in the series (in addition to not being terribly challenging).
Once you learn something, implementing your knowledge is easy: this is the classic metroidvania trope – getting a new power (or, in Outer Wilds, new knowledge) immediately makes you think of five other places you could use it. This is where Outer Wilds (and Tunic) pulls ahead of Super Mario 64, I think – SM64 has few powers, many mechanics are just explained on random signposts, and the caps you gain are a more artificial gate rather than a signal of a challenge you have yet to overcome (the cap stages are not really more hidden or difficult than regular stages).
Finally, Outer Wilds lets the player “break” its progression: technically, most discoveries in Outer Wilds are explicitly told to the player … somewhere. In practice, most discoveries are instead realized by the player. This is where Outer Wild’s brilliance truly comes from – the world doesn’t care how you got that knowledge or skill, just that you have it. This is also what makes Outer Wilds have practically no replay value – but in doing so you empower the player to “feel” smart whenever they break that progression while not making them feel dumb when they can’t.
If we compare these lessons to Dark Souls, we can see why the Dark Souls tutorial will feel arcane for most new players: accomplishments are rewarded by bonfires, but the reward feels less like an accomplishment and more just like a relief. You won’t feel like you’re being rewarded with new knowledge or power, really, by making that progress. Failure isn’t a huge setback, but it can definitely feel like it when you permanently lose 10k souls due to falling off a cliff from carelessness during a corpse run. This is even worse in Dark Souls 2 when every failure chips away at your maximum health. Because the world is so deadly before you learn combat’s cadence, even retreading your steps can feel insurmountable. And, though there are plenty of things that let you break the “normal” progression of the game, there’s little indication of this (even if you chose the Master Key) – you have to be very familiar with the game before you know you’re breaking it. Dark Souls’ tutorial is perfectly aimed for people who have previously played a Souls-like, but usually fails for those first experiencing it.
Not all good games have good tutorials, and not all bad games have bad tutorials. That being said – and I’m not sure where I first heard this – the opening hour of your game/movie/TV show is your only chance to capture your player/viewer’s attention. A bad tutorial will show your first-timers that you don’t really care about them. As much as I like Pillars of Eternity, throwing your player into a world where you not only have to learn an entire cRPG system (which is a common problem, and I’m not sure it is possible to tutorialize) but also the language and terms being thrown about as if you know about them (which is one of those things that can very easily turn an interesting book – I’m looking at you, Sci-Fi – into a terrible slog). Pillars of Eternity is an exception (and they do try), but most often media doesn’t improve as it goes along. So very many games will make a “standard” tutorial that everyone will want to skip (and quite often won’t be able to), and it doesn’t have to be that way. A game can be immediately fun while still helping new players understand your game – and often, that’s the mark of a good game overall.
So, obviously, Celeste goes to Tier One – both for its entertaining story and gameplay, as well as for its wonderful tutorialization – proof that you can have an unskippable tutorial without draining the will to play from your experienced player base (and in the case of Outer Wilds, make an entire game around it).