Puzzle games are my favorite kind of game, and I’m good at them. I will while away the hours as I am drifting off to sleep or working or driving or eating, perpetually analyzing the tools and options at my disposal for the current choke point in my progress. I’ve had eyes for perplexity since I won a riddle competition at age 12 together with my mother, who conferred to me my love of gaming, and I’ve been riding that high for decades. Give me your associative word games, your spatial reasoning, your codebreaking, your leaps of logic, your mysteries. Give me your Outer Wilds, your Tunic, your Portal, your Inside, or even your Picross. There is nothing quite like an undertaking that captures my mind and extorts it to analyze and, in the end, manifest the beautiful and unassailable truth.
Helix: Descent N Ascent is a puzzle game as elegant as it is picturesque. Presented entirely in black and white, the player is invited to proceed room by room to collect sigils and open new doors, occasionally in pursuit of a doppelgänger with a scar. Tools for puzzle solving are presented and tutorialized and eventually inventively combined one after another as the player encounters obstacles with gradually increasing complexity.
The first thing I noticed about Helix is how smooth the animation is. Everything about the player character’s walk cycle is clean and graceful as it moves back and forth across the flip-screen network of static abstract sketches that constitute the environment. Every location is hand-drawn and detailed, in contrast with the simple color scheme, and the scenes evoke unfinished drawings on canvas not only straightforwardly in appearance but also in the way they progress from drafted illustrations to fading grids to entirely blank spaces. It’s giving Eleanor Rigby.
What music there is exists in transitional spaces and feels tense in a way that unsettles the skin. More often than music, there is instead atmospheric noise, ambient noise like the humming of machines or the gentle howling of the wind. The star of perhaps the whole game for me is its sound design. From footsteps to doors opening to collisions of objects with one another, every sound is crisp and tactile. The feel and the audiovisual style of the game exude remarkable polish, at least for the first 3/5ths.
Helix’s aforementioned elegance applies especially to its progression. The first five areas can be completed in any order, and they acquaint the player with the game’s five basic tools, which I refer to as the pillar, the tether, the drone, the inverter, and… the Pokéball. (It’s… look—it’s a Pokéball, okay? It’s a sphere. You throw it at animals to capture them. It’s a Pokéball.)
The subsequent 10 areas can also be completed in any order and present all the different combinations of these items, which can be merged to create new tools, and this is where things start getting really interesting. The tether can be combined with the Pokéball to create a fishing rod. The Pokéball can be combined with the pillar to make a larger Pokéball. At any given moment the player has three different avenues of tech to try.
The final 10 areas provide instances of all the different triad combinations, creating even more amalgamations to experiment with and seven different available tools for any given puzzle. In my opinion, this is where the game truly takes off n ascends. I had been engrossed before, but this was the chapter of the game where I was forced to stop, consider, and meditate on solutions. Unfortunately, this is also where my first substantive critique emerged: these 10 final puzzles are all post-credits.
That’s right, as I collected my 15th sigil and turned my covetous and perpetually unsated problem-solving appetite toward the remaining 10, just before the game unleashed the full weight of its sublime, crafty potential, the game closed off all gates and forced me into the ending cutscene.
I am not, as a rule, opposed to post-game content or “true ending” alternate paths, and I wouldn’t take issue with this decision normally except for two factors: 1) I felt like the game ended just when it was truly getting started, and 2) nothing happens after the postgame puzzles. I finished all 10 of the post-credit puzzles, and each of those, mind you, was split into three other individual moderately complex puzzles, so really I did 30. All this took nearly twice as long as the base game. If you believe, as I did, that by doing all the toughest puzzles and entering a secret gate that you would be greeted with anything whatsoever, you are in for a bit of a letdown as the credits roll again with precisely the same fanfare and no additional lore, cutscene, message, or even static image.
Were these postgame puzzles their own reward? Begrudgingly, yes. They were entertainingly unique and satisfied my hunger for revelation. I loved every minute. However I, in my ravenous narrative completionism, did desire something further.
I have one more complaint, and it brings me sorrow to mention because I think it’s unbecoming of the game’s overall quality: the postgame puzzles are pretty buggy. Up until the credits, the game was seamless, but cracks started to appear when I combined multiple things with the drone tool. I found myself soft-locked, sometimes due to items not working and sometimes due to gates closing, and I was forced to quit and restart on a not insignificant number of occasions.
This was not the biggest deal. The checkpoints are charitable, so I was never repeating much work, but it did disrupt the flow and disturb my serene contemplation. I’m holding out hope that the late game gets some more playtesting: these bugs take an otherwise superb experience down one notch further than it deserves.
Helix: Descent N Ascent is a game that pulls the player forward with a cycle of calls and answers, draining off the cup before filling another. I am preposterously prideful when it comes to puzzles, refusing to look up solutions. This mindset often works for me, though, because the best games, games like Helix, reward patience and provide the space necessary to sit and think. The base game takes around 6 hours and full completion around 15. Postgame comes too soon and is disappointingly buggy, but the experience is magnificent nonetheless.
