MIO: Memories in Orbit Review
MIO: Memories in Orbit looks and feels so good, you’ll forgive its flaws.
MIO: Memories in Orbit. Credit: Douze Dixièmes / Focus Entertainment
MIO: Memories in Orbit is a Metroidvania from French indie studio Douze Dixièmes, published by Focus Entertainment. Hollow Knight: Silksong came out late in 2025, and with MIO’s release in January, genre fans are feasting. MIO is a standout entry in the genre that holds its own against the titan that is Silksong, and is one of the best games of the year so far.
You play as MIO, a small android who wakes up aboard the Vessel, a derelict generational spaceship. You must explore the massive ship’s interconnected environments that are now in disrepair, crawling with malfunctioning machines and AIs. You piece together what happened gradually, through environmental storytelling and NPC encounters. The narrative is fragmented and abstract rather than directly told. I found it compelling and appealingly mysterious, perfectly suited to the game’s beautifully realized atmosphere, especially since the map hides so many secrets.
Movement and control are stellar. You start with a double jump, something unusual for the genre but a welcome surprise. Dodging, however, isn’t available until after a boss battle, a design choice that made the early game unnecessarily frustrating. New traversal abilities, like grapple, glide, and wall-climb, follow gradually, and they all feel great to use; traversal puzzles frequently require you to chain them together in satisfying ways. Modifiers, the game's upgrade system, let you tailor MIO's build to your playstyle, and you can even equip negative mods that introduce penalties in exchange for more temporary open slots.
MIO: Memories in Orbit. Credit: Douze Dixièmes / Focus Entertainment
The Vessel's map is enormous and intricately designed, with secrets and branching paths that reward careful exploration and backtracking. I lost hours just navigating it, though this isn’t always a positive. Fast travel locations are a bit limited, and sometimes difficult to unlock because they have two requirements: finding the location itself, then finding the floaty robot that powers it. Save points are also the only spots where you respawn after death, so getting back to where you were can be a long trek. This is especially frustrating when you’re trying to tackle a boss fight, and the save isn’t close. I respect the developers’ choice to go with a relatively minimal map design, but it often led me to a lot of running in circles around the world to figure out where to go next.
Combat feels good, but isn’t as varied as traversal. You’re limited to a multi-directional close-range melee attack—one of the reasons starting without the dodge was so jarring. You have to be quick and precise to avoid damage. Boss encounters are genuinely excellent, both varied and epic. Some can appear overly difficult, but victory all comes down to recognizing the patterns and being patient.
MIO is beautiful. While the game plays in 2D, the world is rendered in 3D with great depth; there’s tons of detail in the foreground and background that make the environments feel like real places with scale. The color palette is mostly soft and watercolor-like, and 3D models have black outlines and crosshatching that resemble pencil linework. The game combines that hand-drawn aesthetic with dynamic lighting to stunning effect. Meanwhile, character animations and bombastic anime-style effects give every action and strike in combat real weight and power, perfectly complementing the playfeel. These devs understand juice.
MIO: Memories in Orbit doesn't reinvent the Metroidvania, but just about everything it does, it does very well, while making it feel amazing to play. This, coupled with its highly distinctive art direction, makes it a standout game in the genre right now, and one of the best games so far this year in my eyes. When it feels as good as it does to play, I couldn’t stay bothered by its negatives for very long as I kept coming back.
MIO: Memories in Orbit
MIO: Memories in Orbit looks and feels so good, you’ll forgive its flaws.
