Review: Helix: Descent N Ascent

Helix: Descent N Ascent is, I think, a game about loneliness. At least I felt lonely while playing it. You don’t get much guidance, nor does it provide a lot of character interaction. What you do get is plenty of mystery, ambiguous puzzles, and some of the more interesting visuals I’ve seen in quite some time.

I’ll start with those visuals, since they do the heavy lifting. Helix uses a highly detailed monochromatic style that’s quite striking. It’s symbolic, sure—descent and ascent, light and dark, black and white—but it’s also used to lay out (and, in some cases, mask) the many puzzles you’ll face. The contrast creates a harsh environment filled with thorns, tangles, and knots, but it starts to feel oddly comfortable after a while.

Navigating through this environment can sometimes be quite complex. There are puzzles to solve, of course, and I’ll get to those in a bit. But even without them, figuring out where to go in Helix is confusing regardless of whether you’re ascending or descending. Open doorways sometimes appear as nothing more than shadows on a wall. Hallways that appear to be blocked may not be. It’s rare that you’re ever given guidance on what to do next.

What you are given is a set of powers to help open your way. You acquire more of these as the game progresses, and you’re typically given a puzzle right away that illustrates their use. Knowing when to use them is pretty simple, but how is another matter. Many are time-limited, so you’ll need to be efficient in order to, for example, trip the switch on the next screen that opens the door to a new room.

Fans of puzzle games will know this means plenty of back-and-forth as you encounter closed doors and suss out their solutions. It’s easy to get lost in this environment, so getting back to now unlockable areas can often prove problematic. This slows things down quite a bit. So does the ability to combine the powers you pick up, which of course leads to plenty of trial and error-based solutions.

Thankfully, the developers at Badass Mongoose provided one key way to break up the trudgery: video games! Sprinkled throughout is a Donkey Kong-like arcade game that you must play to advance. It’s a bit more difficult than it maybe needs to be, but it does a good job of lightening the mood and giving you something to do other than walk back and forth and back again.

That’s what ultimately lingers with Helix: Descent N Ascent, which is a bit of a shame. Early on, I was fine with the lack of guidance or a meaningful narrative. The puzzles and proceedings were left to wonder, and the newness of the stark environment was enough to carry me through. But as things wore on, I found the juggling of powers to work through the more complex puzzles started to feel like a chore. I spent too much time trying to figure out what I was missing. And when I did figure it out, I arrived at the answer more from just trying everything than from having acquired a sense for the game’s systems and logic.

Because of this, the Helix’s presentation makes more of an impression than does the gameplay itself. At only around 10 to 15 hours to completion, maybe the visuals are enough. They are really good, after all. But I would like to see them applied to a world that does a bit more to engage the player throughout.