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BEL2026 Video Game Madness - West Region 2nd Round: 5 Hades vs. 13 Celeste
2026 Video Game Madness - West Region 2nd Round
West Region Round of 32 Matchup Preview: 5 Hades vs. 13 Celeste
The Hugo Award Winner Against the Game That Redefined What Accessibility Means
Celeste beat Elden Ring.
That sentence needs to sit on its own before anything else is said about this matchup, because nothing that follows makes complete sense without understanding what happened in the Round of 64 and what it says about the fanbase that Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry's platformer has built over the seven years since it came out.
Elden Ring was the West's 4 seed. It scored a 96 on Metacritic. It won the 2022 Game of the Year at The Game Awards and the BAFTA and virtually every other major award ceremony of its year. It sold over 25 million copies. It is one of the greatest action RPGs ever made. It lost to a 13 seed by a score of 4-1, the most lopsided result of any matchup in the entire first round across all four regions, and one of the most striking results in VGM history.
How does a 94-rated precision platformer beat a 96-rated open-world RPG by three votes in a bracket tournament? The answer is in what Celeste means to the people who love it, and why they love it in the specific way they do.
Celeste came out in January 2018 from Maddy Thorson and Noel Berry, a two-person team based in Canada. It is a precision platformer about a young woman named Madeline climbing a mountain called Celeste, a journey the game uses as a metaphor for managing anxiety and depression and the internal voices that tell you that you cannot do things you can absolutely do. It scored a 94 on Metacritic. It won Best Independent Game at The Game Awards. It is one of the finest precision platformers ever made.
It is also, unusually for a game in that genre, built around a comprehensive assist mode that lets players adjust the game's difficulty in whatever direction they need. Slower game speed. Extra air dashes. Invincibility. The options are there and the game places no judgment on using them. Celeste's argument is that the experience of the story and the world matters more than whether you reached it on the hardest difficulty setting, and that accessibility is not the opposite of challenge but a precondition for it.
That argument resonates with a specific group of players in a specific and personal way. For players who have felt excluded by difficulty-gated games, for players who have found community in a game that explicitly welcomed them, for players who connected with Madeline's story on a level that went beyond platforming, Celeste is not just a game. It is something more personal than that. Those players vote with the full weight of what the game means to them. They voted Celeste to a 4-1 win over one of the greatest action RPGs ever made.
Now they face Hades, the West's 5 seed, which arrived in the Round of 32 by a more conventional path, beating Animal Crossing: New Horizons 2-1 in the Round of 64.
Hades came out on all platforms in September 2020 after a two-year Early Access run from Supergiant Games, the San Francisco studio that has never made a bad game. It is a roguelike action game set in the ancient Greek underworld. You play as Zagreus, the son of Hades, attempting to escape and reach the surface in defiance of his father's wishes. Every attempt takes you through procedurally arranged rooms filled with enemies, granting you weapons and boons from Olympian gods who want to help you succeed. You die. Many times. Every death sends you back to the House of Hades, where you talk to characters, upgrade your abilities, and learn more about the story before trying again.
What Hades did that no roguelike before it had quite managed was make narrative progress and mechanical progress reinforce each other perfectly. Every run advances the story. Characters develop. Relationships deepen. The world reveals itself gradually through hundreds of conversations that accumulate across dozens of runs into something genuinely moving. It scored a 93 on Metacritic. It won the Hugo Award for Best Video Game. It won BAFTA Game of the Year. Supergiant had been making excellent games for a decade and Hades was the one that convinced everyone who had not yet been paying attention.
Hades has a broad and devoted fanbase. Celeste has a specific and intensely committed one. Animal Crossing has a broad audience too, and Hades beat it. Elden Ring has a devoted fanbase, and Celeste beat it by three votes.
Both of these games are indie games from small studios. Both of them made cases about what games could be and found audiences that responded personally to those cases. In the Round of 32, those two audiences face each other, and whoever turns out more votes on March 21 advances to the West's Super Sixteen.
The West bracket continues March 21. 12PM.
