[Edit: Whoops, I accidentally wrote a full on Essay replying to your reply. Got distracted and kept on writing. Enjoy!]

Did the C-sides a few days ago, and tbh I felt farewell was more of a highlight. Felt like it had more weight after taking a over a third of my playtime and deaths. I even somewhat wish that I had done farewell after 8c as it felt much better an ending. After Beating 8c I realised that I was finally finished with the game. A feeling I had never really felt before. All my other games either have endless replayablity (Minecraft, Terraria) or I continue to challenge myself with more difficult feats. Under these "Challenge" type games, I always felt like there was a next step, so it feels weird to have beaten Celeste. for there to be no next step, no next challenge. Anyways, this was a long detour to explain why the end of the game feels so strange, I'm saying Goodbye to the game. 8c unceremoniously cues the end screen and gives you a 'you did it' postcard. Even 7c did a better job with some profound words from granny, which is strange as 7c wasn't ever going to be the last level. But Farewell? It's whole thing is about, as its name implies, saying farewell. For Madeline, this is to Granny, but for us, it's supposed to be the game. It works so much better as an ending to the game as a whole. But of course, that high when you beat a challenge comes from the challenge itself. I feel like farewell did that better too. While mostly easier, farewell took much longer to beat. It felt like a long arduous travel. The C sides while harder, were a breeze, most taking 20-30 minutes and even 7c only taking an hour. Farewell was 24 hours of gameplay over weeks. Of course for me, there might of been a bias, as I had gotten Celeste off of XBOX game pass, which it went off of for over a year. Which, when it happened, I was right in the middle of Farewell. So when it finally returned to game pass so I could beat it, it resolved a nearly 2 year old annoying feeling of incompleteness. Also I have just realised that I have accidentally wrote a full on video game essay, got a little too distracted there...