Heliopedia is a world-building game where you create and manage tiny planets. You play by exploring a solar system, collecting elements and combining them together to create new discoveries. It is an exploration game where the joy in in experimenting with new combinations of elements to see what you create and what happens to your new planet as a result.

Play involves moving around with the mouse to explore a solar system and collect chemical elements. You click elements to add them to your inventory. Once you have three pieces of coal, you feed them to the sun, who gives birth to a barren, formless planet. Your role now is to explore combinations of elements to create different climates, terrains and eventually if all goes well, life on your planet.

As you collect and combine more elements, you make new discoveries, which are added to an in game encyclopaedia. This allows you to shape your new world in different ways, for example adding gases to the atmosphere to build up a certain type of climate or shaping the terrain of your planet to allow new life to be formed.

It's a game that commits to letting you discover how elements combine (for good or bad) without hand holding or direction. You play god by exploring, combining and watching what happens as a result. Along the way you learn about how the elements react to each other.