Every month, the Game of the Month Club plays some game or other and talks about it at the New York arcade/art space/general locus of worthwhile happenings called Babycastles.

Back in July, it was my turn to lead the discussion, and so I did a talk on Celeste, zooming in on the game’s place in the tradition of platformers—and more specifically masocore platformers, and even more specifically what I call zen masocore platformers. The talk was aimed at people who already find those topics interesting, and also at people for whom most or all of those words are currently gibberish. And anybody in between. Anybody at all, ideally.

There’s now a recording up on YouTube, and so, enjoy!

• Game of the Month Club streams live and archives a bunch of other non-me presentations on Babycastles’ Twitch channel.

• Here’s Edmund McMillen’s thing on difficulty.

• Here’s Matt Thorson making a Super Mario Maker level.

• Here’s TASBot playing the hell out of Celeste.

• And here’s Mark Brown on Celeste.

NOW GET DOWN THERE AND DO IT AGAIN!!