A roguelike word game: climb the volcano
Last updated: 2026-08-18
Heat Ascension builds a roguelike on top of the word game at the heart of Hot & Cold: guess a word, get told how close it is in meaning to a secret. One run is one climb, 9 floors up the side of a volcano, each floor a secret word, each word rarer than the last. There is no guess limit. Instead you carry a bank of 90 HP and race the cold: every floor opens with free guesses, then every 7 guesses you spend on that floor, more of the cold end of the heat scale starts costing HP to guess. Stay ahead of it and you climb free; linger and the floor bleeds you. Run out and the climb is over. Reach the rim and a boss is waiting.
Heat Ascension lives in the iOS & Android app, not on the web: every floor is scored on your device against the bundled word list, so the mode is hidden in the browser. Grab the app below and the button drops you straight onto the mountain.
Get the app on the App Store or on Google Play.
The route is the draft
Between floors you're on a map, and the map is where the roguelike lives. Each row offers a couple of nodes and you can only reach some of them, so picking your route is picking your build: a Rest node banks HP, a Cache grants hint charges, a Steep floor uses a rarer word but pays double HP for clearing it, and card nodes deal boons, bargains and gambits: everything from a card that shows the word's length, to a bargain that hands you HP now in exchange for hiding it. Your first climbs draft from 12 of them, and the full catalog of 44 opens up as you level. The whole mountain is visible from the first floor, including the boss at the top, so a run rewards reading the map as much as knowing words.
A boss with a name
Every climb ends at a Gate: one of 3 fixed bosses, drawn per run and named on the map from floor one, so you climb the whole way knowing what's waiting. Crosswind makes a costly guess cost more the longer you stay on a floor. The Echo holds your guesses blind and answers them in batches. The Twins hide two secrets behind one alternating pointer, and you have to find both. Because the boss is always visible, "I died to the Twins again" becomes a plan for the next run rather than a complaint about this one.
Losing still moves you forward
Runs end, that's the genre, but every climb past the first few floors pays climber XP, scaled by how deep it got, and levels widen the card pool you draft from. It's meta progression the way roguelikes do it best: more variety, never more power. Summiting unlocks the next Ascension tier, a harder version of the mountain (up to Ascension 10), and the harder tiers pay more XP for the same climb. You start each run with 4 hint charges; the rest you find on the mountain.
The same honest scoring underneath
Every guess is ranked against about 15,000 words by closeness in meaning, exactly as in every other mode. Rank #1 is the secret, and the heat ladder runs from 🥶 freezing to 🌋 blazing as you close in. If that scoring is new to you, how to play covers it in two minutes, and the tips page will save you a few floors' worth of HP. For the rest of the family: the daily puzzle is one shared word a day, the endless word game is the no-stakes practice loop, and the bot match is the other app-only mode, a head-to-head round against a computer opponent, fully offline.