If you've played a lot of really tough platformers, I'd love to hear whether you think the screens in Celeste are harder or in the same league as game x and why. Especially in the context of Farewell, it's toughest and final chapter. I think the best comparison I can think of in games I've played is Farewell vs Cotton Alley, the bonus final world in Super Meat Boy. But I think I have to say Farewell is harder because no matter how frustratingly difficult a lot of stages in SMB are, most of them, win or lose, are shorter and quicker in nature. Celeste has some very long set pieces that require a lot of memorization and when you die, like on the final screen of Farewell or any C-side, you do lose a lot of progress compared to dying in a Super Meat Boy level.

I also think of Champions Road in Super Mario 3D World and The Perfect Run in Super Mario Galaxy 2. Champions Road is one of the toughest challenges I've faced in gaming. I think that one has a case for being longer and tougher to pull off than any one screen in Farewell. The Perfect Run asks you to beat a series of short stages without taking any damage at all, which is what makes that really nerve wracking and tough. But I do feel with enough memorization and practice, you can neutralize the hazards in each of those, with some of the rooms becoming very easy so that you only have to worry about a couple of tough rooms. Farewell is more of an endurance test, wracking your brain over and over to come up with so many complex solutions and then execute them only to be faced with yet another ridiculous room. And I think Meat Boy's Cotton Alley is similar to that, just that those levels feel like quick little mini games by comparison.

I think Celeste might be among the most difficult platformer I've ever played that doesn't have lives, continues or game overs. It's tough to compare to say, NES, SNES or Genesis platformer games because those games had lives and it imposed very steep penalties for failure, which usually meant they could not challenge you quite as much with their platforming puzzles and trick jumps because they knew you were only going to have x amount of tries at it. But I don't want to assume it's the toughest thing in its whole genre either. Too many people are good at speedrunning it.

But I did just think of one tougher, but it is a PC game that was kind of created as a joke and a kaizo game. I Wanna Be The Guy. You might remember it as the game where even the apples fall off the friendly looking trees and crush you into a bloody mess. I've never beaten that game and it always felt too extreme for me. It's similar in that you have infinite lives and you take it screen by screen. One jarring difference between the games is how much IWBTG aims to intimidate and discourage the player while Celeste builds you up and encourages you even while throwing down gauntlet after gauntlet. Meat Boy definitely has an air of this too while the Mario games I mentioned are more on the encouraging side.