Heart Door

Heart Door
The gate opening upon having collected 15 Crystal Hearts.
Other names	Heart Gate
Found in	8  •  9
List of entities

Heart Doors are cyan-colored barriers that block Madeline from advancing unless the player has a set number of crystal hearts collected within a given save file. It comes available in several widths, each suited to a different number of hearts. If Madeline stands to the left of a closed heart door, it will start counting the number of hearts she has; if there are enough, the door will open up from the center with a "flash" line effect.

Heart Doors can either be preexisting or fall from above after Madeline passes a trigger. Falling Heart Doors are the only entities that can kill Madeline if she has Invincibility turned on via Assist Mode or Variant Mode.

Occurrence

In vanilla Celeste, Heart Doors are present in:

• Core A-Side, in the third room; this gate is preexisting, of small width, and requires four (4) hearts to open.
• Core B-Side, in the second room; this gate is preexisting, of moderate width, and requires fifteen (15) hearts to open.
• Core C-Side, in the first room; this gate is preexisting, of large width, and requires twenty-three (23) hearts to open.
• Farewell, in the first room of the Event Horizon subchapter; this gate is falling, of moderate width, and requires fifteen (15) hearts to open.

Trivia

• Cheat Mode allows bypassing Heart Doors, regardless of how many crystal hearts the player has collected so far. However, falling Heart Doors can still kill Madeline.
• It is possible to skip the heart gate in Farewell by doing a quick Superdash followed by a Wavedash. It also allows skipping the long opening animation.
  • The Farewell heart door is also the only entity that can kill a player using invincibility. Unlike other entities that could crush the player, the gate doesn't become transparent when Madeline is inside.
• When Farewell was in development, it was supposed to be gated behind 25 hearts at first (all crystal hearts through 8C, plus the gray heart in Farewell). Eventually, the amount was lowered to 15, and the gate was moved to the middle of the chapter, as new rooms came to give newer players at least a preview of the new chapter. This means you can start Farewell with 5 hearts: 4 to unlock Core A-Side and the heart for completing it.