MIO: Memories in Orbit

15 Mar, 2026

The French are at it again. First they came for our beloved JRPGs and...well, they won a GOTY award for that one, so I guess we can't really argue with results. I don't think they'll be repeating that feat with Memories in Orbit - Douze Dixièmes's sophomore effort¹ is more good than great, and doesn't quite measure up to the Hollow Knight games that they're clearly aping - but it's an admirable effort nonetheless.

Waking up on a derelict spaceship, we play as the small, scouting robot Mio. At one point this was a colony ship for humans, but those days have clearly passed, seeing as everything is broken and shut down while the plant life is wildly overgrown. Once you get through a short tutorial area, you get dumped out in the Nexus where you get two immediate goals: provide some Nacre (the game's currency) to get the computer systems back online, and to help Samsk (a centipede-esque robot) look for his friend, Tomo, somewhere on the ship. By the time you finish the first real area, you've probably collected enough nacre to get the computers up and running again, which activates the Spine and reveals your true objective - the Heart (which maintains the ship and all its inhabitants) is failing. There are five "Pearls" that are in charge of various parts of the ship, and they've been MIA ever since the Spine got shut down. Find them, figure out what's going on, and get their help if possible.

From there, the game cuts you loose to explore, but while MIO may look like a Metroidvania, it doesn't really play like one. The critical path is pretty narrow and defined, and while you can wander off to find goodies and upgrades, you're on a pretty tight leash for the first half(?) of the game or so. Ostensibly, you have a choice between two pearls to start, but you need a power-up that you get about halfway through Haven to even start Metropolis, nor can you head to the Labs and the bottom part of the map until you meet both The Breath and The Blood. It honestly reminds me a lot of Dark Souls, which is probably unsurprising given the other games it's cribbing from: You start with a pair of objectives that you can technically do in either order (but there is a very clear "expected" sequence), it narrows you down to a single path, then opens up dramatically at the end when it's like "Okay, here's like five or six other areas you could explore if you want to and the final boss is [here] whenever you're ready to call it a day."

But even beyond the overall meta-structure of the game, there's still a lot less exploration than you might expect. The areas themselves are largely linear platforming gauntlets with the occasional combat room, and after a few rooms they loop back around to your "hub" room to unlock a shortcut so that you don't have to go through the whole thing every time. Again, it's very Dark Souls; maybe "very Bloodborne" if you prefer, but there's not really a lot of daylight between the two. This is, to be clear, a completely valid school of Metroidvania design! You typically see it in the more challenging games for obvious reasons - your Nine Sols, Order of Ecclesias, etc - but there's nothing wrong with the "stage-based" design. What MIO adds to this particular equation are big rooms that expect you to do a lot of maneuvers in one go without ever touching the ground. You remember the Path of Pain? Everyone's favorite sequence in Hollow Knight? MIO looks you square in the eye and says "Okay, but what if we had a mini-Path of Pain in every zone?"

Now, this is not to say that MIO is a precision platformer. For as challenging as these sequences are, you're very rarely asked to do more than your standard jumps, grapples, etc - you just have to do a LOT of them at once. This does lead us to my first major complaint about the game, though: the controls are just a little too inconsistent for these sequences. The grapple doesn't quite go in the direction that you tilt the stick, causing you to fall and restart the sequence. Mio registers a side attack instead of a downward one, so you miss the attack and don't regenerate any energy, at which point your glide gives out and you fall into spikes. While I don't think it ruins the game by any means, it is definitely one of the bigger sticking points, especially when the difficulty starts to escalate and you're 2/3 of the way through a boss fight and the floor disappears. One of the worst offenders is an (optional) endgame zone that consists entirely of a hub room, a 4-5 room sequence that loops around to the left, and a 4-5 room that loops around to the right. I do not know if I would have bothered to clear them if I didn't have the modifier that gives you an extra point of health after staying on the ground for a few seconds.

Beyond that though, MIO doesn't really have a lot of surprises for you. The list of power-ups you get is pretty short - a grapple hook, a glide, a spot-dodge that functions more like a parry, and a wall-crawling ability that works like the Metroid 2 Spider Ball, with a couple upgrades to round out the list. There's an attempt to give you some build variety via the modifier system, which sits somewhere between the HK Charm system and Nier Automata's upgrades, but they're still limited by how basic the actual combat is. You get a 3-hit combo, you can attack directly above or beneath you, and the grapple works mostly as expected - but that's all you get. No projectiles and no real movement options, so while you can tweak your build, a lot of them are things like "The next attack after gliding/grappling does more damage" or "You do more damage the lower your health is." Even the ones that are more focused on traversal tend to be uninteresting stuff like "killing 3 enemies regenerates a pip of health," changes to how (and how quickly) you can regenerate energy, or just outright giving you extra health capacity.

So if the upgrades are boring, the platforming is (mostly) pretty straightforward, and the combat is basic, what are we actually here for? Well, for one, the game is very pretty. I love the sketchy, watercolor-esque art style, especially in areas like Haven which are overflowing with plant life. The art direction as a whole does a great job of selling the idea that the Vessel is falling apart, and while the music mostly hits the sad, poignant notes that you'd expect from a game like this, it also loves to throw you a curveball and drop the bass when you wander into a boss fight - boss fights that are pretty good, considering the limitations of the combat. And while I'm not much of a lore guy, the story being told here is pretty good, once you see it all. I highly recommend collecting all the candles and offering them as tribute, because the scenes that they unlock are really important for understanding everything that's going on behind the scenes.

Some other quick notes:

• While it isn't explicitly required to complete the game, I don't think(?) it ever tells you that using the dodge while striding makes you go faster and lets you reach some places you otherwise would fall just short on.
• I did have to reach for a guide a couple times for the optional endgame areas. Some of it might have been avoidable if I had been more proactive about using the map pins, but there are at least two areas (one of them being the path to the true final boss) I would have missed entirely without some external help.
• The game permanently knocks off one of your health pips at a few points in the story, which is a bold decision that feels really bad in the moment, but ultimately isn't that big of a deal. There are enough healing chalices scattered around that I never felt like I needed more than about 5 HP at any given time, and given that it also reduces the HP of all the enemies when it happens, it actually makes the game easier in the mid-game.
• I do wish that checkpoints were more frequent than they actually are. Because they double as your fast travel points, there's generally only one of them per area, and while the abundance of shortcuts DOES help, it can be a massive pain in the ass to get to somewhere specific if you need to hunt down a collectable or open a shortcut that you missed or something.

Overall, the game is good! It's definitely not a slam-dunk classic, and it falls short of its most obvious inspirations in several ways - though it should be said that "not as good as Silksong" is a standard that uh...basically no one is going to meet. You do need to have a bit of a stomach for extended platforming, but it's never that difficult, especially if you skip some of the optional endgame areas. And best of all, it doesn't really overstay its welcome, as I got pretty close to 100% in just shy of 25 hours. It may not be the most "traditional" Metroidvania, but it's a good time all the same, and for $20 it's a pretty good deal for what it offers.