Mio: Memories in Orbit

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that sets in early with most metroidvanias — the moment the map becomes a checklist and the “world” a corridor with a coat of paint. MIO: Memories in Orbit mostly avoids that. In a genre this saturated, that is not a small thing.

Released January 20, 2026 by French studio Douze Dixièmes and published by Focus Entertainment, MIO puts you inside the Vessel: a derelict generation ark the size of a small country, drifting through space while vegetation eats its bulkheads and its maintenance machines slowly lose their minds. You play MIO, a small android who wakes up with no context and a talent for climbing walls. It is a 2.5D game — hand-drawn, layered art on a plane you can actually read — and it launched on PC and Nintendo platforms. Single-player only, paid at $13.99.

Focus is not a publisher that gambles blindly. Its portfolio runs from A Plague Tale to the Warhammer catalogue, and it has a house style: mid-budget, strong art direction, European sensibility, no live-service rot. MIO fits that mold precisely, and its market position is equally precise — this is a premium mid-tier release aimed squarely at players who finished Hollow Knight and Ori and want another map worth memorizing. That’s a crowded, discerning, unforgiving audience.

The reception tells a telling story: critics landed at a Metacritic of 83 — good, but not great, and the gap between those words is the entire shape of this game: an exploration design that deserves better welded to a combat system that drags it down.

• A Single Continuous Hand-Drawn World: The Vessel is one interconnected space, not a hub with spokes. Sealed doors, unreachable ledges and dead ends resolve later, and the layout is dense enough that shortcuts land as revelations rather than convenience unlocks.
• A Traversal Kit With Real Personality: The grappling hook, air glide, and spider-like wall-cling stack into a movement vocabulary that changes how a room reads. The wall-cling in particular is the standout — it turns vertical surfaces into floors and re-frames every space already visited.
• Modifier-Driven Progression: Components scavenged from the ship upgrade MIO’s kit, while Modifiers slot in to reshape her fighting style. This is the build-craft layer, and it’s where the combat finally starts breathing.
• Repairable Robots as Living Lore: Fix broken machines scattered through the ark and they pay you back in bonuses and narrative. It’s environmental storytelling with a mechanical incentive attached — a smarter delivery system than the audio logs this genre usually resorts to.
• A Substantial Bestiary: A deep roster of enemy types and a large stable of guardian bosses, built around movement puzzles as much as damage checks.

The Traversal Loop

Start here, because this is what the studio actually built the game around. MIO’s core loop is not fight-heal-fight. It is look, fail, remember, return.

Douze Dixièmes understands something a lot of its competitors don’t: an ability is only interesting if it retroactively changes the meaning of space already walked through. The grapple doesn’t just cross gaps; it converts ceilings into anchor points. The glide doesn’t just extend jumps; it makes long vertical shafts navigable in a way that rewrites the mental route through three previous zones. And the wall-cling — the one that gives MIO her insectile, slightly unsettling silhouette — collapses the distinction between floor and wall entirely.

The result is a world built to accumulate in the head the way a real building does, rewarding memory over map-reading. That’s the highest compliment a metroidvania can earn, and MIO earns it repeatedly through its first two-thirds.

Combat: The Weak Link

The combat is underpowered and repetitive in the early game, and it is the single biggest thing holding this game back from the top shelf.

The design intent is legible — precision- and timing-based, closer to a fencing match than a brawl. Fine. But intent doesn’t survive an early-game kit with almost no options. The opening swing is tuned weightless, enemies absorb hits without the impact feedback that sells a parry-and-punish system, and for a long stretch the optimal answer to most encounters is avoidance. When the best play in a combat-heavy game is don’t engage, something in the tuning is off.

It does improve. Once Modifiers come online and the upgrade tree opens up, MIO’s kit acquires the snap it needed from the start. That’s a genuine fix — but it’s a fix that arrives after the point where many players form their opinion, and the lukewarm aggregate reception suggests the message hasn’t gotten easier to sell over time.

The Boss Problem

The guardians are the game’s most divisive component, and the criticism is specific rather than vague: too many lean on awkward movement-based gimmicks, and several introduce difficulty spikes that feel unearned rather than escalating.

There’s a real design tension here. A game this proud of its traversal naturally wants bosses that test traversal. But a movement gimmick asks the player to solve a puzzle under pressure while a combat system that’s already the weakest part of the package handles the pressure. When both halves are shaky at once, frustration reads as unfairness. The best encounters here are excellent — legible, pattern-driven, satisfying to crack. The worst feel tuned for someone already expert with a controller.

The Second-Half Slump

The quietest structural complaint is the most interesting: navigation and backtracking get verbose in the back half. Not broken. Verbose.

That’s a pacing failure, and it’s the shadow side of the same choice that makes the opening strong. A single continuous world with no fast-travel abundance is fantastic while it’s still being discovered. Once it’s mapped and fetch routes cross three biomes for an upgrade component, that density becomes distance. The traversal kit absorbs a lot of this — gliding across the Vessel is never unpleasant — but “never unpleasant” is a much lower bar than the opening clears.

Onboarding and Friction

MIO is confident enough to withhold. There’s minimal hand-holding, the story assembles itself out of repaired robots and environmental detail, and the game trusts the player to notice things. That posture has a cost: onboarding friction is front-loaded, with weak combat and deliberate obscurity in the same opening stretch — a lot to ask of a player who hasn’t yet fallen for the art. Push past it. The game on the other side justifies the entry cost.

The art direction is the reason this game exists, and it is excellent.

The comic and anime-inflected hand-drawn work gives the Vessel a texture that 3D-with-a-filter pipelines cannot fake — inked linework, deliberate color scripting, and a decaying-industrial-meets-overgrowth palette that manages melancholy without sliding into the desaturated gray sludge that afflicts most “beautiful ruin” games. The 2.5D layering is used with restraint: parallax depth for atmosphere, never for confusion about where the playable plane sits. That sounds basic. It is routinely botched by bigger studios.

The soundtrack matches — ambient, patient, willing to leave silence in the room. It’s scoring an empty ship, and it plays that role correctly instead of shouting.

The UI is clean and unobtrusive, though the map deserves a note: it’s competent, and in a game whose late hours hinge on efficient routing, competent is the floor, not the ceiling. A better waypoint or route-annotation system would have taken real friction out of the back half.

On the technical side, a 2D-forward pipeline of this scope is light on hardware by design, and the art style degrades gracefully across hardware tiers in a way polygon-heavy games never do.

Steam / PC. The reference version. A 2.5D metroidvania with precision timing is nearly the ideal handheld genre, and the portable form factor suits the game’s slow, exploratory rhythm. On desktop, use a controller. The traversal kit is analog-stick-shaped; grapple-into-glide-into-wall-cling chains want a thumbstick, and keyboard-and-mouse works without ever feeling native.

Nintendo Switch. Hand-drawn 2.5D is exactly the kind of art that holds up on a handheld screen, and MIO’s design — short bursts of exploration, frequent natural stopping points — is well-suited to portable play. The art style’s low hardware demands make it a natural fit for the platform.

• Anyone shopping primarily for combat feel. Play Hollow Knight: Silksong or a Soulslike instead.
• Players with low tolerance for backtracking or a preference for generous fast travel.

MIO: Memories in Orbit is a good game with one loud, structural flaw, and it’s rare to see the two so cleanly separable. The Vessel is a feat of level design — dense, legible, memorable, and drawn with a care that mid-budget releases rarely afford. Douze Dixièmes clearly poured its conviction into exploration, and that conviction shows in every corridor.

Then the sword comes out and the illusion thins. A combat system that spends its opening stretch feeling like an obligation, bosses that mistake awkwardness for challenge, and a late-game map that grows tiresome to cross — these aren’t fatal, but together they cap the game well short of what the art alone promises.

Buy it for the ship, not the fight. On that basis, we recommend it to traversal-first players and suggest everyone else wait for a sale — just don’t expect the combat to ever become the reason to keep playing.