Video Game / Strawberry Jam Collab

Madeline sets off to find many, many more strawberries.

The Strawberry Jam Collab is a giant Game Mod of Celeste that adds 111 new maps to the game. It was made by numerous collaborators and released on GameBanana on 18 February 2023.

The mod is a successor to The 2020 Celeste Spring Community Collab, previously the largest mod in Celeste.

It can be downloaded here.

Along with tropes from Celeste, the Strawberry Jam Collab contains examples of:

• Advanced Movement Technique: Many advanced movement techniques are taught in the gyms, and are mandatory for beating certain stages. A level's designated difficulty might be bumped up or down depending on how advanced its tech requirements are.
• all lowercase letters: the titles of paint, kevintechspam.bin, and summit are all in lowercase. paint's title reflects its chill atmosphere, while "kevintechspam.bin" is supposed to look like an all-lowercase file name, with the same going to the name of the song that plays in it, "kevintechnospam.wav".
• Alliterative Name:
  • The Heartside level names. Blueberry Bay, Raspberry Roots, Mango Mesa, Starfruit Supernova, and Passionfruit Pantheon.
  • Other maps with alliterative names include Loopy Lagoon and Cassette Cliffs from Beginner, Construction Conundrum and Midnight Monsoon from Intermediate, Lethal Laser Laboratory, Toggle Theory, Starlight Station, and Tectonic Trenches from Advanced, Time Trouble, Caper Cavortion, Chromatic Complex, and Fortress Fall from Expert, and Lava Layer and Pinball Purgatory from Grandmaster.
• All the Worlds Are a Stage:
  • Each lobby has a Heartside, where every single map in the lobby returns for one more room. Unlike in the Spring Collab and most other mods following its formula, each map has its own checkpoint instead of multiple maps being mixed for each checkpoint.
  • summit has a single screen based on each section of the original game's Summit (except for 2500M, which has two screens, one of which is apparently only a meter tall). Taken up to eleven in the Heartside room, which compresses the entire Summit into a continuous, brutal climb.
• Anti-Frustration Features: While most Heartside flags have to be done in one go, Pufferfish Transportation Co.'s includes checkpoints in between puzzles. The execution of the puzzles isn't that hard once you've figured them out, so this saves you from tedious replays of early parts just for another chance to experiment with one of the later puzzles.
• Art Course: paint is one of the more vibrant maps in the collab, and also features paintbrush lasers as one of its obstacles. The map's story also deals with overworking and artistic perfection.
• Bait-and-Switch: Done twice in Starfruit Supernova, back to back: After completing flag 4, the transition into flag 3 looks to be another confusing puzzle using portals and moving blocks... but take a couple steps forward, and the platform you're standing on crumbles, dropping you right into the section based on Plasma Reactor. After that flag, the following transition room has electricity blocking the way to the right side where decoration from Psychokinetic is clearly visible, but when you destroy the breaker box to remove it, you're warped into Chromatic Complex, the real flag 2, with almost no warning. Beating that room warps you back, with the room layout being the same except that Psychokinetic has completely taken over.
• Call-Back:
  • The Beginner map "If my 'driveway' almost did you in..." quotes one of Granny's lines word-for-word as the title. The mechanic involved in this map is the same as the one in the aformentioned driveway, the blocks that crush the player when it gets close (or in this case, moves when the player gets close).
  • The Intermediate map "Pointless Machines" calls back to the similarly-named Blue Crystal Heart in Forsaken City, whose collection requires you to perform a sequence of dashes. The level revolves around a mechanic that requires you to perform a series of dashes to complete its sections.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: As with the vanilla game, the first three difficulties' hearts are colored blue, red, and yellow respectively. As with the Spring Collab, the last two's are orange and purple.
• Easter Egg:
  • You can pick up crabs in the Beginner Lobby. Throwing a crab into a hidden pedestal located in the opposite side of the lobby as the crabs breaks a block, containing a cat that can be pet.
  • As a matter of fact, all five lobbies contain one or two hidden cats to pet, accessible via hidden passages, tricky platforming, or in one instance, finding hidden keys. A handful of maps have them, too, usually in bonus challenge rooms.
• Edible Theme Naming: The Heartsides all have an Alliterative Name including a fruit or berry that roughly matches the color code of their associated lobby: Blueberry Bay (Beginner/blue), Raspberry Roots (Intermediate/pink), Mango Mesa (Advanced/yellow), Starfruit Supernova (Expert/orange) and Passionfruit Pantheon (Grandmaster/purple).
• Fun with Homophones: Java's Crypt is is very much a crypt named after JavaScript.
• Gravity Screw: Some levels, such as Potential for Anything, feature gimmicks that invert gravity.
• Harder Than Hard: Levels are normally rated green, yellow, or red on a meter to indicate their difficulty within a lobby. Then the Grandmaster lobby features Nelumbo, Ivory, The Solar Express, and Pinball Purgatory that literally break the rating scale, with their icon being a broken meter with the needle outside the colored range.
• Hint System: Dropzle provides hints through the menu if the player gets stuck.
• Hornet Hole: Three of them, in fact! The first three difficulties have a bee-themed map, with Beginner Lobby's Treehive making use of bounching in dream blocks and activating zip movers, the Intermediate Lobby's Honeyzip Inc. having players cling onto moving tracks, and the Advanced Lobby's Bee Berserk featuring many bees to dodge while players navigate through a hive.
• Hub Level: The lobbies that contain each map. There's one for each of the five difficulties, with the sea-themed Beginner Lobby, the roots-themed Intermediate Lobby, the mesa-themed Advanced Lobby, the space-themed Expert Lobby, and the heaven-themed Grandmaster Lobby.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert, and Grandmaster.
• Interface Screw:
  • The level Vertigo features many areas that flip the level upside-down.
  • One of the strawberries in Lava Layer has a tutorial bird at the end, with its text being a copypasta that covers the entire screen. It doesn't actually block much of your vision, but it may startle you enough to make you mess up the last little stretch of the room.
• It's All Upstairs From Here: Midnight Spire from Beginner, The Tower from Intermediate, and The Tower (XVI) (which are different maps) all have the player ascending a tower of some sort.
• Kaizo Trap: A quite interesting variation - a handful of maps (most notably Summit Down-Side and Lava Layer) have strawberries at the very end which require taking advantage of the Level Goal's bouncy properties. If you dash into the heart by accident, or otherwise fail the required movement, either you die and respawn... or you beat the map, automatically kicking you out. Have fun playing through the map again just for another chance at that berry!
• Level Ate: Loopy Lagoon in Beginner is themed around cereal and milk, and Sea of Soup in Intermediate is themed around soup.
• Levels Take Flight: Skyline Usurper takes place in a flying machine.
• Locomotive Level: Part of The Solar Express takes place in the titular train, which is stuck in space. The player's goal is to retrieve fuel for it and place it in the engine room to allow it to cruise.
• Macro Zone: Java's Crypt, due to Madeline being shrunk to the size of an ant. One level gimmick is potions that allow Madeline to regain her size.
• Metropolis Level: Over The City takes place over the city, jumping from building to building.
• Mineral MacGuffin: A crystal is used as fuel for the Solar Express, which Cornelius really wants to have.
• Motif: Strawberries, naturally.
• Multiple Endings:
  • Oddly for a modded Celeste level, Belated Valentines' Day has two. Avoiding the Anti-Climax Level Goal in the final screen and instead fully completing it leads to Madeline learning that Theo sent a lot of Valentines' cards and becomes his Valentine.
  • Psychokinetic has a regular heart, but it's possible to build up enough speed to go to another screen instead of beating the level. This screen contains a gate requiring all 3 of the level's berries to get past, beyond which lies another screen. Beating that seems to lead to a Moon Berry, but actually leads to a room with a bunch of headstones, from which there is no escape except the heart.
• Musical Gameplay:
  • Some maps prominently feature cassette blocks that blink in time with the music, as well as variants of them. This includes the Beginner map Cassette Cliffs, which makes use of blinking zip movers, and the Grandmaster map Shattersong with blocks blinking in Uncommon Time.
  • Many of paint's gameplay mechanics are synced to the music, like literal cassette blocks, cannons, and lasers that move or fire with the music.
• Nintendo Hard: Even more so than the game it's based on, Strawberry Jam is absolutely brutal. By the middle of the advanced lobby, screens are tougher than even Farewell at its toughest, and they only grow tougher from there. The three toughest lobbies require Advanced Movement Techniques well beyond what the main game requires, with the platforming itself being pinpoint to match.
• Nostalgia Level: There are some remixes of vanilla levels with a new twist, such as Coresaken City mixes Core and Forsaken City, and summit in the Grandmaster Lobby which remixes Summit but with one dash. There is also Cycle Madness B-Side, which is one of Cycle Madness from the Spring Collab.
• Palmtree Panic: The north half of the Beginner Lobby is themed after beaches, as well as its heartside, Blueberry Bay.
• Parasol Parachute: The main mechanic of Raindrops on Roses. Madeline can brandish a parasol anytime which she can use to float when she needs to.
• Pinball Zone: Pinball Purgatory lives up to its name, with Madeline getting sucked inside a pinball machine and having to work her way through numerous bumpers. It's also extremely hard.
• Recurring Riff: The same few notes in Strawberry Dreamland recur throughout the mod, with it appearing in most of the mod's chapter select screen, the lobbies and heartsides, the gym and library, and the credits. Pretty much everywhere that isn't a map.
• Rhyming Title: The Advanced level Slime Time.
• Scaling the Summit: Being a giant mod of a game whose story is this trope, it's natural that there would be a summit or two to scale here.
  • Summit Down-Side has you climbing a mountain, battling harsh winds and numerous springs that can send the player back far.
  • summit from the Grandmaster Lobby is a hard remix of Summit from the vanilla game, only this time Madeline has only one dash instead of two.
• Sequence Breaking: You can bypass the puzzles in Dropzle by jumping through the gaps on your own (or finding a setup to do so that doesn't involve the Kevin blocks) instead of solving the Block Puzzle to bypass the spikes. Lampshaded in the intro cutscene:

Madeline: But couldn't I... just jump through the gaps on my own?

Exposition: Yes, you could! However, that's not exactly in the spirit of the map— and besides, it's pretty difficult.

• Shmuck Bait: Late into Pointless Machines, one of the "codes" you need to enter consists of... a single dash to the right. Enter the code correctly, which is incredibly easy to do, and you'll be rewarded with the exit getting blocked off.
• Shout-Out:
  • Potential for Anything is a reference to VVVVVV, mimicking it in its design and gameplay.
  • From the Intermediate lobby, The Tower is a reference to the stage of the same name from VVVVVV, down to incorporating its signature Wrap Around and rising spike floor in the second half.
  • Rose Garden is a nod to Gusty Garden Galaxy from Super Mario Galaxy. The rose mechanic plays similarly to the flower mechanic in Gusty Garden, and the music features a nearly identical version of the Gusty Garden motif.
  • EAT GIRL is a nod to an indie game with the same name, mimicking its focus on navigating mazes while collecting circular objects.
  • Summit Down-Side in itself already takes cues from Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, but also features a familiar pot inside a hidden wall left of the starting point, only accessible when falling down from the end of the map back to the start. It's possible, albeit brutally difficult, to carry the pot all the way back to the top.
• Springs, Springs Everywhere: Springs are a common obstacle, however special mention goes to Summit Down-Side, which has numerous springs in the most inconvenient places, which combines in the most dangerous ways with the wind blowing you back. Many of the springs don't refill your dash, either, giving you no way to recover should you hit them, and they're strategically placed so that you will hit them if you're instinctively holding right to recover after falling from further up.
• Tide Level: Lava Layer is one of the Spiky Scenery variation, where platforms the player needs to get to and spikes they need to avoid rise and fall like tides.
• Training Stage: A hybrid of one with a Tutorial for Advanced Movement Techniques. Five Gyms allow players to learn and practice tech, separated based on how hard the tech is to execute (and whether it will be used in its lobby), and the Library allows players to learn about more in-depth and technical mechanics like the exact length of a player's dash or hitboxes. Both of them even fit the aesthetics!
• Triumphant Reprise: One brief reprise of the Recurring Riff right after the last flag in Passionfruit Pantheon, accompanying the player as they smash the crystal hearts of the previous Heartsides on their way to ascension.
• Underground Level: The Intermediate Lobby fits the bill, as well as its heartside Raspberry Roots. Some maps also take place underground, including Azure Caverns and Rightside Down Cavern.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Some maps radically change the gameplay:
  • Seeing Is Believing encourages the player to play blindfolded with another person guiding them through the level. If that is not possible, the level provides a singleplayer mode that has an Author Avatar guide the player through.
  • Dropzle turns the game into a Block Puzzle of moving Kevins around to create a setup to cross a pixel-perfect gap of spikes.
  • A Gift From the Stars leans more into puzzle-platforming, requiring players to conserve and use their dashes carefully.
• Visual Pun: The expert map FLOATING POINT contains both a mechanic where Madeline floats when she is in certain points, and floating-point numbers that are floating throughout the map.
• Wagon Train to the Stars: The Solar Express in the titular map is a train that goes through space, split into multiple wagons separated by distance, with what seems to be a really tall engine room.
• Warp Whistle: Benches in the lobbies allow you to teleport to any bench you've found in that lobby, and even in other lobbies as well.
• Womb Level: Belly of the Beast in the Grandmaster Lobby takes place inside a monster. Your goal is to kill the monster by bringing a cannon ball to its heart.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Played straight and inverted by Belated Valentines' Day on two different occasions. The yellow mini-heart appears after a few screens in what seems to be the end of the level, but turns out to be a fake like the other hearts (used in platforming) in the level. It then properly introduces mini-hearts in red, pink, and yellow and expects you to get used to them being a proper mechanic in the level... until the final screen, which looks like a proper platforming puzzle, where the first mini-heart is the Level Goal.