Celeste settled the easy-mode argument with a single settings screen

Celeste released on 25 January 2018 for PC, Switch and PlayStation 4, and a day later on Xbox. It is a very hard platformer about a young woman climbing a mountain and having a panic attack on the way up. You are expected to die thousands of times; the game displays the death counter without embarrassment.

And in the same menu sits Assist Mode. Not an easy difficulty on one button, but a list of independent switches: slow the game to any percentage, make dashes infinite, remove stamina drain, turn on invincibility, skip a chapter. Each item separate, each toggled at any moment.

Inside the team the feature was first called Cheat Mode. It was renamed to Assist Mode — and that, I think, was the more consequential decision of the two.

The word decides how the person pressing the button feels about themselves. Cheat says you are getting away with something. Assist says the game is on your side.

The second decision is just as careful: the real difficulty sits off the critical path. Finishing the story is hard but achievable; the strawberries, the alternate tapes of each level and the still harder versions that follow are all optional. The game does not soften its summit, it simply does not require you to climb it.

Which is also the answer to the perennial argument about whether a hard game should have an easy mode. The question is put wrongly: what matters is not the presence of a button but where the challenge lives. If it lives in optional content, assistance on the main path destroys nothing. If the entire meaning of a game rests on one obstacle, then there is essentially nothing to discuss.