MIO: Memories In Orbit Review - Beauty In The Pain
While 2026 is littered with high-profile games, January is relatively bare for big names, making it the ideal time for smaller-scale titles to bop up and steal the limelight. MIO: Memories In Orbit is one of those titles. A Metroidvania that draws gameplay inspiration from genre leaders such as Hollow Knight, and Ori, and artistic influence from anime, and sci-fi, with some gorgeous hand-drawn visuals. A beautiful, mysterious, and intriguing title, MIO quickly lures the player into its grasp with its alluring potential, and then tightens its grip upon you thanks to some brutal boss design, and an expansive, detailed world begging to be explored.
You will assume the role of MIO, a tiny robot in a much larger world, and it has become your job to investigate what has happened to The Vessel, an elaborate maze of a spaceship that has served as your home. When the caretakers (called Pearls) of the Vessel suddenly stop performing their role though, the fate of the ark comes into question, and MIO journeys out to investigate what has happened to the Pearls, fighting off hordes of volatile threats in your quest to restore peace and order. The development team at Douze Dixièmes has done an exceptional job in layering a narrative atop a simple enough base concept. Players will find numerous collectibles throughout their journey that expand the lore of the game further, and if you dive deep into the numerous threads connecting to the main plot, you’ll soon become attached to its many quirky characters.
The elaborate nature of the story slots neatly in with the equally expansive world for the player to explore. Being a Metroidvania, the environment of The Vessel is huge, maze-like in nature, with various pathways that twist and twirl around, connect back on each other, and conceal secrets in many of its corners. As MIO’s skillset expands, more of the world can be explored, making backtracking an essential approach to extract the most from the experience. From finding nuggets or lore to upgrades that boost your strength, health capacity, or even uncovering a modifier, there’s a lot to be found for those who are willing to pick at the game’s seams. The modifiers themselves allow MIO to change their base loadout, from gaining extra layers of protection from damage, to increasing the rate of Nacre, the games currency, that is dropped after besting an opponent. There is even a small selection of modifiers where for all that they give the player substantial upsides, they also come at a cost. Each modifier requires a certain amount of space within MIO’s Allocation Matrix, and while the storage space of the matrix can be expanded, the quantity, and requirements of, the various modifiers will require players to carefully pick and choose which they want to equip to suit their playstyle, or the needs of a boss they’re stuck on, or platforming puzzle they wish to navigate.
Modifiers can only be changed at an Overseer, which essentially are the game’s save points and fast-travel locations. There are only a small handful of these points within the game, and so big decisions need to be made whenever you’re at one, as the impacts may be felt for an hour or more of subsequent gameplay. Players will accumulate Nacre throughout their play, which can be spent on modifiers and modifier extensions, which grant more room to install modifiers, as well as upgrades to your protective coat in the form of coating components. Any deaths in gameplay will see the player lose all of their liquid Nacre, but throughout the map there are a few crystalisers strewn around that take that liquid Nacre and crystalise it. Crystalised Nacre isn’t lost in the event of a death, while Nacre of the liquid variety cannot be recouped.
You’ll lose that liquid Nacre often because while the game’s base-level enemies aren’t an overwhelming threat, the game’s difficulty spikes substantially whenever you find yourself facing off against one of its 15+ bosses. Each boss possesses an elaborate move-set, and they often toggle between these attacks at breakneck speed, evoking the speed and brutality of an encounter in Hollow Knight. To succeed, you’ll need to keep your composure, learn their movement patterns, and take the opportunities as they emerge to strike back. This is all much easier said than done, as these bosses are, especially in the late-game, brutally difficult, while some of the platforming sequences leading up to these encounters derive inspiration from some of the toughest segments from games like Ori and the Blind Forest. One aspect that was both baffling and infuriating was a narrative element called ‘tremors’ that would manifest in seemingly random moments where MIO would lose a pip of health. These weren’t temporary either, all the work you’d done, exploring the environment, and building your health capacity could be thwarted in a snap of a finger with a pip of health permanently removed.
Douze Dixièmes have offered players some small solutions to make the combat or platforming sequences a bit more approachable through accessibility options. None of these make the game easy, but three different assist options allow bosses to degrade between attempts, making them weaker each time you fight them (seemingly up to a limit), make normal enemies passive, until provoked by your attacks, and offer an extra layer of protection if you remain grounded for a few seconds. The latter assist is particularly helpful as you try to navigate some of the game’s more elaborate and borderline spiteful platforming puzzles. Should you fail, stand still for a few seconds after you respawn, let the layer of protection recoup, and then try again. None of these assist features break the difficulty of the game, and you’ll still find a lot of challenge in the game’s design, but it might allow you to keep all of your hair follicles in yoru head at times.
As well as being huge and complicated, the world of The Vessel is beautiful, as are the character designs of the gigantic ark’s inhabitants. The shimmering of metal, as colours clash in combat or traversal, all realised through Douze Dixièmes’s gorgeous hand-drawn art style, looks amazing. Pinks, yellows, browns, blues, and every other colour of the rainbow vibrantly burst off the screen.
MIO: Memories In Orbit doesn’t want to make your life easy while you play, but there’s so much nuance and beauty to the world, and so many secrets revealed through its inhabitants, that you’ll find yourself eager to push on and attempt that boss for the 20th time. MIO draws its inspirations from modern-day genre leaders, introduces some facets that are wholly its own, and delivers 2026 its first hit of the year.
MIO: Memories In Orbit was reviewed on PS5 with a code kindly provided by the publisher, Focus Entertainment.
