MIO: Memories in Orbit is the second game from Douze Dixièmes, an independent studio from France. It’s a Metroidvania with a beautiful painterly aesthetic, sort of cel-shaded, but with delicate watercolor surfaces instead of chunky blocks of color. It’s set on a derelict ark in space, where an android has been powered on after an indeterminate period of being offline. The ship seems like it’s falling apart, and it’s sentient subsystems have gone awry, but not the normal kind of awry where their eyes turn red and they decide to murder everything, more of a melancholic depressive self-isolation in response to everything falling apart. If everything is failing why should I get out of space-bed to try to fix it? Mio is seemingly the only entity left on The Vessel interested in fixing things.

In typical Metroidvania fashion, it’s a 2D platformer focused on exploration, environmental puzzles, and combat. It’s got a huge map to explore, upgrades to unlock, enemies to farm for cash to dump into the modifier system, bosses to find and kill, alternate paths to unlock, everything you’d expect. It’s got a decently sized cast of characters, and has a good number of side-quests and optional content to complete beyond the ~15hrs worth of main storyline.

While the game is good enough to recommend, I have a few complaints that make me hesitant from a strong recommendation.

  1. The platforming and movement are generally good, but often times the platforming puzzles are challenging to read and clumsy to execute. Upon finishing a difficult platforming section I rarely felt like I really planned what I wanted to do and then skillfully executed it. Instead more often than not I felt like I fumbled my way through and succeeded largely by accident. This gets significantly worse in the back-half of the game where the puzzles get significantly more punishing, and require way more precision than the game’s movement tech lets you pull off easily.

    I had to set the game down for a week or so after hitting one particularly demanding platforming segment near the end of the game, only to be rewarded after just barely squeaking through it with another even MORE challenging platforming gauntlet, and that too had me set the game down for a bit.

  2. Mio’s ability kit just isn’t that great. You’ve got a 3-hit combo. You’ve got a grapple that works on static points and enemies. You’ve got some basic movement abilities. That’s it. And most of this stuff beyond the 3-hit combo is portioned out over the course of the game. Even with modifiers, there just isn’t that much variety in how you’ll be playing, you’ll be using that 3 hit combo forever.

  3. The mod system feels sorely under-used. Mio’s kit can be further tweaked via “mods” you find or buy throughout the game. Mods are limited by a capacity of slots you can use, some mods require more slots, some grant slots but at a cost. Personally, once I found a “good” mod, I figured out how to equip it, and then never took it off.

    There are also some combos of mods that just completely trivialize the game, like you can equip one mod that gives you more slots at a cost of enemies dropping less currency, and another one that makes enemies drop more currency than you lost from equipping that other one. Why ever take this combo off? I don’t know, so I didn’t, until I had bought everything and had no use for money. There’s another mod that just makes all health-refill stations free. Why ever remove this? Maybe there’s a bunch of mods in the game that I didn’t find that bring the variety, but I felt like I hunted down most of the mods in the game and never found anything earth-shattering.

  4. The game doesn’t do a great job of indicating what you’re supposed to be doing next. This could sort of be construed as a good thing, it can be nice to have a game not be overly hand-holdy, but this is the other extreme. You’re told “go find THE BLOOD”, and aren’t told what you’re looking for, where they are, what they need, etc. Go look at your map and figure out what you can traverse now. Have you found the right place? Do you understand how to traverse it? Are you failing because you don’t know what you’re doing? Are you at the wrong place? Are you at the right place, know what you’re doing, but are just failing because you’re bad at the game? Impossible to tell.

It’s good and I absolutely recommend this to anyone needing another Metroidvania after having squoze all there is to squeeze from Silksong, but don’t expect something of the same scale or level of polish as Silksong. But again, that’s ok.