Come chase your clone through an exquisite, comicbook-inspired world of seashells and ancient machines

Helix: Descent N Ascent has a demo

Helix: Descent N Ascent sounds similar it should beryllium a mascot platformer starring a jaunty DNA molecule with floating Rayman hands, whose peculiar powerfulness is making worldly spell up and down. Up and down the evolutionary ladder, even! A level crippled successful which you tin germinate and devolve your quality astatine will, to lick antithetic puzzles? Good lord, we’ll marque 1 cardinal dollars retired of this! Somebody get maine the CEO of Midway.

Alas for my vocation prospects, Midway is nary more. And Helix is not a mascot platformer, astir apt to its benefit. As revealed by the caller Steam demo, it’s a dilatory and atmospheric puzzler successful which you analyse a fallen civilisation, portion chasing your doppelganger. You being a lanky Area-51-looking lad, who acquires paranormal powers and indispensable weave them into solutions for terrain puzzles of the Pressure Plate N Lever variety.

It each takes spot successful a monochrome satellite of scraped and sinuous thorns, pipes and spiral shells, whose touchstones span “1980s black-and-white indie comics, 1990s manga, and 1970s Franco-Belgian comics”. Do not strain your entorhinal cortex attempting to visualise these entangled references. Check retired the trailer instead.

This is surely acold excessively swankypoo for Midway - immortal creators of Ed, Edd n Eddy: The Mis-Edventures, to accidental thing of Jackie Chan Stuntmaster - but immoderate of your powers bash astir apt suffice arsenic telekinesis, which means that Helix tin beryllium mentioned successful the aforesaid enactment arsenic Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy without starting a pub brawl (I patronise a precise circumstantial benignant of pub). The archetypal powerfulness you get lets you conjure blocks and shove them around. Then you get the quality to alert a small explodable drone that resembles your head. There are games wrong the game, including an eerie small tribute to Donkey Kong.

The screenshots whitethorn suggest artists doodling astatine random, but those azygous surface rooms articulation up into a larger maze that has definite mystique, reminding maine of Amanita’s creations present and there. The puzzles aren’t that brain-fizzing truthful far, but the Steam leafage suggests that things volition escalate. “Play successful 25 distinctive ways, jumping betwixt 3 levels of complexity portion you research the barren lands of Helix.” The afloat crippled is retired aboriginal this year.