When light rises from shadow and carries an entire world with it
Something happens at a precise moment in the Helix: Descent N Ascent demo (we covered it in this article) — a quiet realization that what you’re looking at is genuinely rare. Not a loud epiphany, not a plot twist — something subtler: the feeling of being perfectly at ease in a world you don’t yet know, and not wanting to leave it. Barely thirty minutes of gameplay, and you’re already looking for excuses to delay that final title screen.
Helix: Descent N Ascent marks the debut project of Badass Mongoose, a small indie studio based in Belgium, founded by Cedric De Muelenaere and Gillian Sampont. Announced in May 2024, the game joined Steam Next Fest in February 2026 with a free demo that immediately earned an outstanding response: 98% of user reviews on Steam rate it positively. A clear signal. The full release on PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch is set for May 21, 2026.
A World in Black and White
The first thing that strikes you about Helix is what you see — or rather, what you don’t see: color. The entire game unfolds in strict black and white, and the choice goes well beyond aesthetics. It reads as programmatic, almost like a manifesto. The visual style draws openly from 1980s black-and-white indie comics, 1990s manga, and the Franco-Belgian comics tradition of the 1970s — that legacy of Moebius, Charlier, and Franquin that shaped generations of European readers, and that the language of video games rarely invokes, let alone with genuine coherence.
The result is a high-contrast, hand-crafted aesthetic: moody landscapes and animated 2D scenery build an artisanal world rich with visual suggestion. The backgrounds move, breathe, seem to exist independently of your presence. These are not simple backdrops — every corner of Helix’s world carries the weight of a history, even before you know how to read it.
For the developers, the monochrome palette is not merely a stylistic decision but a metaphor: the black-and-white imagery symbolizes the duality of light and darkness — a theme that runs through the entire game at the narrative, mechanical, and visual levels alike.
The Protagonist, the Double, the Silence
You begin awake. Or perhaps not — the demo doesn’t specify, and that ambiguity is already an act of writing. You find yourself in a dull, dark, disembodied world, and though you move through it alone, you soon encounter another being who mirrors the protagonist exactly, yet always seems to work against you. Who is this doppelganger? An enemy? An ally? A reflection?
Helix offers no answer, at least not in the demo. Instead, it builds a quiet tension, letting the dark figure appear, interfere, observe — without ever explaining itself. This mysterious counterpart actively disrupts the protagonist throughout the experience, generating friction that operates on both mechanical and thematic levels. It’s an elegant narrative device, one that produces genuine unease without resorting to jump scares or dialogue.
And dialogue, indeed, plays no role here. Helix makes a deliberate choice to tell nothing through words. The story surfaces through environments, images, music — an approach that recalls the great genre touchstones, from INSIDE to GRIS, while maintaining a voice entirely its own. In the founders’ words, the goal is to “surprise players with deeper meaning and thoughtful story layers” — and the demo already makes that ambition felt.
Gameplay: Powers, Combinations, and Lateral Thinking
The demo grants access to three of the five abilities the full game will offer. Simple to describe, nuanced in application: each one transforms how you engage with the surrounding environment, opening possibilities that don’t always announce themselves at first glance.
The power combination system is arguably the most promising element of the design. In the full game, players can combine five abilities in 25 distinct ways across multiple layers of complexity — a structure that hints at a carefully engineered learning curve and a mechanical depth the demo can only hint at.
The puzzles themselves are neither trivial nor cruel. The difficulty hits a precise calibration: you learn by observing, you make mistakes without excessive frustration, and you move forward with the particular satisfaction of figuring things out on your own. The approach is explicitly non-violent — no enemies to defeat, no combat system. Intelligence is the only tool available, and games that build their entire identity on that premise deserve recognition for it alone.
Exploration earns its place too. Hidden secrets in the form of collectibles reward players who venture beyond the obvious routes and investigate every corner. This is not a game that punishes curiosity — it demands it.
Jim Guthrie and Music as Architecture
One of Badass Mongoose’s boldest decisions was building Helix from the ground up around the music of Jim Guthrie — not as a soundtrack added after the fact, but as a constitutive element of the game itself. The press kit states it plainly: the game was “designed and developed with Jim Guthrie’s incredible music in mind (and in ear).”
Guthrie stands today as a composer of recognized prestige in the indie gaming world, with a catalog that includes titles that have become reference points for anyone who loves the genre. His score for Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP in 2011 brought him wide acclaim — a game that shares more than a few spiritual affinities with Helix. Over the years he has signed soundtracks for Below, Nobody Saves the World, and many others — always with that distinctive ability to craft atmospheres suspended between the serene and the unsettling, between the familiar and the alien.
In Helix, his music does exactly what the best video game music should do: it doesn’t accompany the game — it inhabits it. The result is an audiovisual experience that pulls the player toward a dreamlike and difficult-to-describe territory — that rare space where you notice, mid-session, that you’ve been holding your breath.
A Game That Grows from Its Roots
The fact that Helix: Descent N Ascent comes from Belgium is not incidental. The game benefited from the financial support of the Rayonnement Wallonie grant, an initiative of the Walloon Government, with the participation of Wallimage — and something feels right about one of the most promising indie games of 2026 emerging from the same land that gave the world Hergé, Franquin, and the Franco-Belgian comics movement that weighs so heavily on the game’s aesthetic. Something circular lives in that: a work that pays visual homage to that tradition and, at the same time, geographically descends from it.
Badass Mongoose is a small team — probably very small — that chose to think big: a strong visual identity, a high-profile composer, a layered gameplay system, and a narrative ambition that few studios in the sector would dare to attempt. The risk is real; the quality on display, even in a demo, is equally so.
A Demo as a Promise Kept
Thirty minutes of gameplay never really suffice to judge a title, but they often suffice to know whether it’s worth coming back to. Helix: Descent N Ascent belongs to that category of games that make you want not only to continue, but to start over from the beginning — to check whether you missed something: a hidden object, a visual nuance, a connection between elements you didn’t yet know how to read.
The overall impression is of a project that someone thought through with rare coherence: every element — the visual design, the music, the gameplay, the narrative silence — speaks the same language. Helix doesn’t try to be everything. It knows exactly what it wants to be, and pursues it with conviction.
The full game releases on May 21, 2026, on PC via Steam and Nintendo Switch. The demo remains free and available on Steam. Adding it to your wishlist is, at this point, close to a moral obligation.
