Helios Ascending

Can you survive for 3 minutes while your spaceship, Helios, stripped of all communication systems and lacking proper thrust and inertia controls, ascends to glory?

Fight through endless waves of enemies in a desperate mission to save the Sun from total destruction at the hands of evil forces.

You have only 3 lives.

An unforgiving collision system.

And no sound at all.

Because in space, no one can hear you scream...¹

Play Now​

➜ Play Helios Ascending on itch.io

Screenshots​

Gameplay

Pause Screen

Game Over

About​

Helios Ascending is a twin-stick shooter that originated as a university project at Trier University of Applied Sciences during the Winter Semester 2025/26.

It is built on top of helios — a custom C++23 game engine developed from first principles, emphasizing modern software engineering, ECS architecture, and a hand-rolled OpenGL rendering pipeline.

• Dev Blog: Exploratory Development of an ECS-based Game Engine
• helios engine