Chapter 67 - #67: Celeste’s Impact

Chapter 67: Chapter #67: Celeste’s Impact

Over the next few days, Thomas Vale faithfully booted up the stream, only to return from the digital wilderness completely empty-handed every single time.

Eventually, he stopped turning the camera on altogether and just started playing the game in secret.

There were simply too many people watching the broadcast, and while the gaming community didn’t genuinely mean any harm, it was incredibly hard to ignore tens of thousands of people relentlessly roasting him for walking in circles.

Ethan considered dropping a text to his dad to explain some basic hunting mechanics—how wind direction affected scent, how noise traveled, or how to properly track blood spatter.

But after some thought, he decided against it.

Reading the environment and figuring out the game mechanics through pure trial and error was the entire point of the game.

With Thomas ending his daily broadcasts, the players suddenly felt a distinct void in their entertainment schedules.

They had genuinely grown attached to watching the old man rage at the forest.

But Thomas was a fast learner.

Away from the pressure of the live chat, he slowly began to figure out the game’s intricate systems.

He learned how to set up ambushes, how to mask his scent with specialized sprays, and how to patiently crouch in the tall grass near watering holes.

When he finally managed to harvest his very first prey, he was so overwhelmed with excitement that he immediately turned his stream back on just to share the triumph with his audience.

Watching him finally succeed only made the player base even more desperate.

There was nothing more excruciating for a gamer than being forced to watch someone else play an amazing unreleased game.

They swarmed Ethan’s official social media accounts, demanding to know exactly when theHunter: Call of the Wild was going to launch so they could get in the woods themselves.

The community had collectively stopped calling him a "A Good Man" After watching the sheer depth and complexity of the hunting simulator on Thomas’s stream, they had returned to their usual, affectionate cursing of the sadist.

While some players aggressively stalked the updates for rheHunter, an enormous wave of the gaming community was still deeply immersed in Celeste.

As more and more players beat the game and flooded the internet with essays detailing their profound emotional experiences, the industry slowly began to realize the sheer cultural impact the indie platformer was having.

Structurally, the narrative of Celeste was a classic hero’s journey—no different from slaying the dragon to save the kingdom.

But the "dragon" entrenched at the peak of Celeste Mountain wasn’t a fire-breathing monster; it was the red-haired protagonist herself.

It was the player.

The game’s cultural footprint reached an absolute peak when a prominent psychiatric hospital specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy publicly published an open letter of gratitude directed at Sprout Studio.

[ Thank you to Sprout Studio for bringing genuine hope and a sense of profound redemption to patients drowning in their own pain. Your work has truly moved us. Madeline’s agonizing ascent up the mountain is a perfect allegory for personal growth. She was confused, hurting, and constantly told by her own mind that the mountain was impossible to conquer. Yet, after enduring immense emotional turbulence, she finally reconciled with her darkest thoughts and reached the summit.

While the game’s critical reception is already well-documented, we decided to make a bold attempt: integrating this video game into our actual clinical treatment plans. Our medical staff extensively playtested the game before authorizing its use.

We selected a stable patient and provided them with the game during their scheduled therapy sessions, closely monitoring their mental state throughout the process. The results were genuinely astonishing. The game actively functioned as a form of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Mindfulness is a self-awareness practice where a person focuses entirely on the present moment, remaining open and free of self-criticism. Instead of fighting negative thoughts, the patient learns to accept them with curiosity, welcoming every thought—much like Madeline learning to embrace her dark reflection.

It is a beautiful tool for emphasizing the importance of facing emotional blockades and cultivating self-awareness. ]

At the end of the letter, the clinical director expressed genuine, unbridled joy.

They were thrilled that a video game had managed to break through and heal their patients in ways that traditional medical avenues occasionally struggled to reach.

The moment the letter was published online, it was immediately picked up and signal-boosted by First Game News.

Before this, the players had simply assumed that the only thing Celeste was curing was their own personal, low-level anxieties.

When they read the hospital’s official letter of gratitude, they were initially stunned—but quickly accepted it as an undeniable truth.

Because this was a game designed by Nova.

Once you actually played Celeste, its subtle magic was impossible to deny.

Was the brutal difficulty a flaw?

The entire community unanimously agreed it was the game’s greatest strength.

They might complain about the spikes to anyone who would listen, but they knew the sadist had designed it that way on purpose.

The sheer, punishing mechanical difficulty perfectly mirrored the psychological hurdles Madeline faced on her climb.

It forced the player to accept their own imperfections and strive to overcome them through endless, stubborn repetition.

Everyone deserved a chance to climb that mountain.

In the game’s emotional climax, right as Madeline and her dark reflection finally stood together at the summit, they shared a quiet exchange:

[Madeline: It’s not gonna be like this when we go back down.]

[Badeline: Yeah... It’s scary to think about not having a body anymore.]

[Madeline: You’ll still exist though... You’re Part of Me before you came here. Like you always have been. I really hope we can work together from now on.]

[Badeline: I trust you. Still pretty nervous, though... What do we do now?]

[Madeline: ...Let’s enjoy this for a bit...]

The pixel-art vista from the summit was breathtakingly beautiful. The sky was painted in brilliant hues of pink and gold, and having finally conquered the peak, even the howling wind and falling snow felt profoundly romantic.

The revelation that a video game was actively being used to treat clinical depression immediately sent the story rocketing up the trending social media charts.

Ever since Ethan Vale had entered the industry last year, stories about video games had routinely broken out of their niche bubble and captured the mainstream public’s attention.

[

Dragon666: I’ve literally lost count of how many times Nova’s name has hit the trending page.

KuxLikes: Games curing depression? Did Sprout pay for this PR? How much did this article cost?!

Руслан: You can insult the sadistic bastard all you want, but keep Celeste’s name out of your fucking mouth! That game is an absolute masterpiece!

Sooman: I hope everyone who sees this article tries their best to climb their own Celeste Mountain. This is it, Madeline. Just breathe.

Mr. Frawley: No one is allowed to insult our gentle sadist ever again! T_T

]

With the name Celeste dominating the cultural conversation day after day, even people who had never touched a video game in their lives found themselves wanting to try it.

Some people would inevitably fall off during the climb, but those who persevered to the summit would witness a beautiful view that belonged entirely to them.

"Wait... it’s already done?" Ivan swallowed hard, his eyes wide as he stared at his monitor.

Ethan had just transferred a massive, highly encrypted build file over their secure connection.

When Ethan had laid out the roadmap last year, he had promised that the highly anticipated dark fantasy project would be delivered sometime before the middle of this year.

Ivan truly hadn’t expected the game to be finished so soon.

It was barely the end of April.

"I’ve never broken a promised timeline before, have I?" Ethan replied smoothly through the headset.

The development cycle for Bloodborne had entirely drained his capital reserves.

He was completely relying on the game’s imminent launch revenue to fund the studio’s next massive leap forward.

His ambitions for the industry extended far beyond where they were now.

"Alright, incredible. I’ll get the marketing and distribution pipelines spinning up immediately," Ivan nodded, a massive, eager grin spreading across his face as he looked at the completed file.

Without a second thought, Ivan initiated the installation process and booted up the build.

The first thing that filled his screen was a grimy, sickeningly detailed vial of cloudy beige liquid.

A single, thick drop of dark crimson blood fell into the filthy glass container, slowly spiraling and blooming through the murky fluid.

The haunting, eerie tolling of a great bell echoed through a dark, decaying Victorian-era city.

The cobblestone streets were absolutely drenched in gore.

Mangled limbs and horrific, twisted corpses littered the alleyways, the walls permanently stained with visceral, sickening blood spatter.

The low, ominous bell continued to chime in his headphones, the atmosphere of the dead city feeling suffocatingly quiet and fundamentally wrong.

"What... what kind of game is this?!" Ivan gasped, his breathing suddenly shallow.

A cold sweat was already beading on the back of his neck.

The sheer, oppressive horror of the game’s visual design made his skin crawl. He felt his sanity actively draining just looking at the screen!

"Are- Are you serious?!" Ivan yelled into his microphone. "Dude, you literally just cured the entire player base’s mental health, and now you’re going to drop this on them?!"

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Double Chapter for today because of my late uploads lately. My brother needed his laptop for a project (its the laptop that I’m using to work on these fanfics), so I could only create a few Chapters and upload them using my phone.

You can support me at patreon.com/Chaos_King and read 25! Yes, 25 advanced Chapters.