Celeste B-Side Unlock Guide: Cassette Locations and Chapter Preparation

Celeste's B-Sides are the mountain's victory lap with the safety rails pulled off. Each of the eight chapters hides a cassette tape, and touching that tape opens up a harder, shorter remix of the chapter with a whole new soundtrack. Some tapes are sitting right next to the main path. A couple are genuinely sneaky, and one is guarded by a rolling fuzzball. So here's where all eight live, what unlocking them actually does, and how to get your hands ready for the climb back up.

Finding Cassette Tapes

There's one tape per chapter, tucked into the A-Side of chapters 1 through 8. The Prologue, the Epilogue, and Farewell don't have any. Every tape sits in its own cassette room, which is a little self-contained gauntlet of cassette blocks - platforms that appear and vanish in time with an 8-bit version of the chapter's theme. Play with the sound on. The blocks follow the music, so the beat is literally telling you when your floor is about to blink out.

The chapter select screen helps more than you'd expect. Highlight a chapter and you can see which checkpoint holds the tape, along with the berry count for that checkpoint. If you take one tip from this section, make it that one, because it turns "where even is it" into "which room".

One last kindness from the developers: the moment you grab a tape, a bubble scoops Madeline up and carries her back to the start of the room she came from. You never have to claw your way back out of the secret area. (Core is the odd one out - there the bubble drops you at the end instead.)

Chapter 1: Forsaken City

The tape hides at the start of Chasm, the third checkpoint. In Chasm's first room, head left past the zipper into the optional area, then ride the next zipper up two rooms. You'll land in a berry room. See the gap in the left wall, the one covered by another zip mover? Grab that mover and pull it out of the way, then slip through the hole.

Chapter 2: Old Site

This one's in Start, the very first checkpoint, but only after the mirror encounter with Badeline. Once the dream blocks are active, drop to the very bottom of the big hub room and dash straight down through the dream block in the floor. That's the ceiling of the cassette room. Probably the fastest tape to reach in the game.

Chapter 3: Celestial Resort

Third checkpoint, Elevator Shaft. Fight your way to the room holding the chapter's only key, then look at the far-left wall. There's a broken opening with light pouring out of it. That glow is the entrance, and it's honestly one of the easier tapes to spot once you know the tell.

Chapter 4: Golden Ridge

Early in Start, right after the room where you flip switches to move a platform along, check the next room's top-left corner. Bounce off the second white cloud from the left, dash up and left, and you'll clear that corner. Then just keep running left - through the berry room behind the wall and into the tape room.

Chapter 5: Mirror Temple

This is the one people miss. In Depths, go a couple rooms past where you first spot Theo trapped in the mirror, then drop off the metal platform and snag the red orb hidden down and to the right. Ride it through the platforming stretch, poke the dash switches to swing the temple gates open, and work through the rooms they expose. In the third room, the brighter one, there's a cracked section of wall at the bottom right. Walk straight through it.

Chapter 6: Reflection

First room of Hollows, the second checkpoint. There's a Kevin block hanging around near a breakable wall - dash into its arrow face to send it downward, let it plow through the floor to the bottom of the lake, then dash into it again so it smashes the wall off to its left. The hole it leaves is your way in. Madeline can't break that wall herself, so no, you can't skip the Kevin.

Chapter 7: The Summit

Fifth room of the 1500M stretch, the part styled after the resort. An optional path leads out the top of the room, and it's pretty visible. The catch is the dust bunny patrolling the route, so watch its loop and time your climb past it.

Chapter 8: Core

No hunting at all here. Core's tape sits at the very end of the level, and you have to grab it to reach the blue crystal heart and finish the chapter, so it's unmissable. The room right before the heart is a strange, empty, low-gravity void - enjoy the vibe while it lasts.

Unlocking Each B Side

Grabbing a tape does exactly one thing, and it does it instantly: that chapter's B-Side appears on the chapter select screen. You don't need to finish the A-Side first. Unlock the tape mid-chapter, back out to the menu, and you can jump straight into the remix.

A B-Side is a shorter, meaner cut of its chapter. Same mechanics, same setting, roughly half the length, way less mercy. They keep checkpoints, thankfully. Every one ends with a cassette block room and a red crystal heart - dash into the heart and the level wraps up on the spot. And yes, the whole run plays a remixed soundtrack (the game's literal B-Sides album), so even your two hundredth death sounds great.

A couple of things the game doesn't advertise:

• Finishing a B-Side counts as finishing the chapter for progression purposes. Speedrunners exploit this, since 5B and 6B are actually quicker to clear than their A-Sides.
• The red hearts aren't trophies. They're keys, and the whole endgame is built around counting them.

Here's the full chain, front to back:

| What you do | What it opens | | --- | --- | | Grab a chapter's cassette tape | That chapter's B-Side on the chapter select screen | | Collect 4 crystal hearts, any color | Core, the A-Side of chapter 8 | | Clear all seven chapter B-Sides and hold all 8 blue hearts (15 total) | The heart doors in front of Core B-Side and deep inside Farewell | | Beat Core B-Side | Golden strawberries, plus every C-Side | | Clear all seven C-Sides (23 hearts total) | The final gate inside Core C-Side, with Variant Mode behind it |

About those blue hearts: each A-Side has one hidden well off the main path, usually behind a puzzle, and each has its own name and achievement. Core's is the exception - it sits at the end of the level like a B-Side heart does, and it's called the Heart of the Mountain.

So the 15-heart math for Core B-Side works out to every heart you can possibly hold at that point: the 7 hidden blue ones, Core's blue one, and the 7 red ones from the B-Sides. Clearing Core B-Side is also what unlocks the C-Sides (three to four rooms each, no checkpoints, gold hearts at the end) and the golden strawberries that spawn at the start of every level you've beaten. Those goldens demand a deathless full-chapter run, which is a conversation for another day.

Movement Skills to Practice

The basic kit first: Madeline jumps, grabs walls, and dashes in eight directions. Climbing drains stamina, and when the bar's empty she lets go, so walls are resting spots, not apartments. Land on solid ground and the dash refills. Springs and dream blocks top you up too - burn that into memory now, because Core takes it away later.

A few specific skills will carry you through the B-Sides:

Diagonal dash control

Most remix rooms live and die on diagonal dashes chained into jumps. Down-diagonal into a jump covers ground fast; up-diagonal buys height when a wall jump would clip your head. Old Site and Celestial Resort B-Sides will drill this into you whether you asked or not. A good warm-up: pick any Chasm room in 1A and try to clear it touching as few walls as possible.

Wallbounces

Dash straight up while hugging a wall, then jump the moment you're alongside it. Free height, zero stamina spent. The Summit B-Side introduces these at flag 08 with a bird showing you the timing, and it's the first time the game flat-out requires a piece of tech to finish a level. Learn the rhythm somewhere safe before a flag gauntlet is grading you on it.

Dream jumps

Pass through a dream block and jump the instant you pop out the far side. Done right, you keep your exit speed and pick up a fresh jump, which turns a teleport into a launch. The 1000M band of the Summit is built to teach this, and the Summit B-Side leans on dream jumps harder than anywhere else in the game. If your exits feel sluggish, you're jumping late.

Kevin block handling

Dash into the face with the arrows and the block charges that direction, plowing through cracked terrain Madeline can't break herself. The Reflection tape is literally a Kevin puzzle, and Mirror Temple's B-Side gets a lot of mileage out of them. The trick is patience: send it, watch where it settles, then commit.

Double dash budgeting

From the Summit onward Madeline carries two dashes, and the whole level is a lesson in spending them both and still landing somewhere sane. Core keeps the double dash but stops refilling it when you touch down - only dash diamonds, screen transitions, and bubbles restore it there, and springs and dream blocks stop helping too. Suddenly every dash is a resource. That's the biggest single change in the game, and 8B squeezes it for all it's worth.

What you don't need yet

Wavedashes and hyperdashes. The wavedash (a down-diagonal dash started midair, then a jump) gets its formal introduction in Farewell, and Core C-Side literally has a bird in a box teach you hyperdashing. Every B-Side is beatable with the basic kit. If a video clears a room with ultras and demohypers, that's leaderboard routing, not a requirement.

And if a wall ever stops being fun, Assist Mode sits in the options with sliders for stamina, dash count, and game speed. The game itself suggests it. B-Sides are hard enough without pretending the training wheels are shameful.

Planning Strawberry Detours

Red strawberries only grow in A-Sides. B-Sides and C-Sides have none (golden berries show up there after 8B, but those are a different beast). So the A-Side climb is the only time berry detours exist, and it's worth deciding up front whether you're a berry person or a straight-to-the-tape person. Doing both at once tends to make both take longer.

The spread across the game:

| Chapter | Red strawberries | The tricky kinds | | --- | --- | --- | | 1 Forsaken City | 20 | 2 winged | | 2 Old Site | 18 | 1 winged, 1 seeded | | 3 Celestial Resort | 25 | 2 winged | | 4 Golden Ridge | 29 | 1 winged, 1 seeded | | 5 Mirror Temple | 31 | 1 winged, 1 seeded | | 6 Reflection | 0 | none, honest | | 7 The Summit | 47 | 3 winged, 1 seeded | | 8 Core | 5 | plain berries only |

That's 175 in total, which is exactly the threshold for the game's big berry achievement (the badges land at 30, 80, and 175). Reflection sitting at zero is a story thing, not a mistake - that chapter has other ideas about what climbing means.

The rules that shape a detour: touch a berry and it trails behind you through the air. Reach solid ground (or water) and hold it for a fraction of a second to bank it. Die mid-carry and the berries you were towing fly back home, unrecollected. Winged berries bolt the instant you dash anywhere in their room, so those routes are no-dash by design. Seeded ones make you gather every floating seed without touching the floor first - touch down early and the seeds snap back to their starting spots.

A sane way to plan berry runs:

• Do them on a clean pass, not while hunting a tape. Two objectives in one run means restarting both when one goes wrong.
• Treat berry rooms as a preview. A lot of them rehearse the same trick the chapter's B-Side will demand later, just with a safety net underneath. Free practice, plus a berry.
• Use the chapter select counts per checkpoint to find what you're missing, same as with the tapes. No guide needed until a berry is genuinely stumping you.
• There's a 1-UP easter egg if you chain six berries at once without resting on the ground, jumping, or dashing off the floor. Purely a flex, but it's an achievement.

None of it gates the story. Berries buy achievements, bragging rights, and a slightly different pie at the end of the Epilogue - the cast reacts to how big your haul was. The pie is the real endgame reward, honestly.

Preparing for the Summit Remix

The Summit B-Side is the final boss of this whole project. It's by far the longest remix in the game, and it runs the same skeleton as 7A: the climb from Start through the 500M-2500M bands (each one dressed up as an earlier chapter - the city's zippers at 500M, dream blocks at 1000M, the resort's dust bunnies at 1500M, Golden Ridge's wind and snowballs at 2000M, the temple's red bubbles and gates at 2500M), then the flag gauntlet at 3000M. The soundtrack is "Summit (No More Running Mix)", and it does a lot of heavy lifting for your morale up there.

The flag climb shrinks from 30 flags to 20. Flags 20 through 15 blow wind down at you, which kills lazy neutral jumps and makes every ledge a fight. Flags 14 through 9 flip to upwind, which makes you floaty and weird in the opposite direction. Flag 08 introduces wallbounces - the bird gives you a one-room tutorial - and the last eight flags drop the wind entirely and just test wallbounces over and over until the summit.

So the prep, in order:

1. Get the tape first. It's in 1500M, room five, up the optional top path, past the dust bunny. Until you grab it, none of this is even on the menu.
2. Build double-dash legs in 7A. The whole A-Side is a tutorial for spending two dashes and committing to a landing. If 7A still feels shaky, 7B will feel impossible.
3. Drill dream jumps in the 1000M band until the exit-jump is muscle memory. The remix assumes you have it. Late jumps are the number one source of deaths up there.
4. Practice wallbounces early. Any tall shaft works. Dash up next to a wall, jump off, repeat. Arriving at flag 08 with the tech already smooth turns a wall into a speed bump instead of a wall, so to speak.
5. Relearn the wind. Golden Ridge's 4A and the 2000M band are your training grounds. Downwind punishes hesitation, upwind punishes overshooting. Both show up on the flag climb.

Take breaks. A level this long eats stamina in the real-world sense too, and checkpoints are spread thinner than they look. There's a nice payoff with Badeline at the top when it's done - she's genuinely impressed, and it's one of the best little beats in the game.

The practical reward is the red heart. With 7B cleared you're holding all seven red ones, and the only thing between you and the 15-heart doors is the blue set: the seven hidden A-Side hearts plus Core's. Find any four hearts to get into Core in the first place, finish it for its blue heart, sweep the hidden ones you skipped, and the doors to Core B-Side and the one deep in Farewell swing open. That's 15 hearts. Past that point, the mountain stops asking nicely.