Completely random thought, and minor spoiler for Celeste

One of my absolute favorite memories in recent gaming is when I played Celeste for the first time. I tend to notice little quirks and mechanics in games, which I can use to my advantage. I realized relatively early, that a screen-transition refreshes the dash, and that allowed me to get into certain places, that would be out of reach without that. Of course I had to play around with it as much as possible, as this kind of thing is traditionally in most games not entirely intended. I was in shock and amazed, when this was how I found my way to the first secret heart I discovered. I hadn't felt this happy and childlike joy in literal years, that this kind of technique wasn't just accounted for, but even intended and actively used by the developers to reward my kind of exploration of games. Later I figured out how to effectively retain the ability to dash off a platform after an initial dash thanks to some quirks I learned in the Celeste Classic and and tried them out in the regular game. So it was intriguing to see, how it was taught as a necessary technique very late into the game, whereas I did already learn it quite a bit earlier.

Usually, I can use my gameplay style to exploit games in unintended ways and often get out of bounds or break things in other ways. It's how enjoy games the most, because the more common tricks developers use to make players feel good about themselves kind of stopped working for me.. Celeste has a special place in my heart, because the developers didn't just know about these kinds of advanced techniques, but they actively encouraged them while leaving me space to figure them out myself - and out of the blue just reward me for my kind of gameplay. I think this was the first time I've experienced that in any game