MIO: Memories In Orbit Review

All animals, humans included, learn from pain. We touch fire, get burned, we learn not to do that again. And yet our minds can just as easily bury our memories of painful phenomena as kind of override, ensuring there are experiences we continue to seek out despite. It happens to me with getting new tattoos, some will tell you it happens with childbirth, there are things we’re willing enough to suffer for that we ‘forget’ the associated trauma. 

That’s how I felt every time I booted up MIO: Memories in Orbit, a metroidvania that is ostensibly also about the pain response of a complex system and its relationships with memory and progress, but mostly just interested in kicking my fucking teeth in.

MIO sets players up as an android by the same name, a tiny inhabitant of an enormous space-faring ark known as The Vessel. At the game’s outset, this station and its mission have long been abandoned, the only remaining residents being its artificial custodians and an overgrown wildlife. With the mysterious civilisation that once called this place home completely gone, its primary AI caretakers have decayed in ways both physical and logical, threatening an end to all that does remain.

These various functions of The Vessel have fought, flown, frozen and forgotten themselves as a survival response, but your mission to recover their voices and speak their stories is seemingly the sole path to understanding what’s gone wrong and establishing a direction for the future.

From your very first steps on The Vessel, MIO offers little beyond the most basic guidance, somewhat expecting that you’ve arrived already understanding the language of the contemporary metroidvania. But the feat of design that reveals itself as you begin to uncover the vast entirety of the game’s map, is that listening to what’s not being spoken is the only way to truly plumb its deepest depths and surmount its greatest challenges.

Which is all a fluffy way of saying this game will punish you for not paying attention to its subtle signals. You’ll get far enough on the typical metroidvania rhythm of exploring, gaining new abilities that open new paths in previously-visited areas, and repeating. But the better equipped and confident you become, the happier MIO is to absolutely break you back down with something that seems impossible at first glance.

As you gain new traversal functions, like a grappling hook-style launch, a gentle glide and a gravity-defying wall climb, you’ll be beholden to a fairly short stamina gauge that dictates your range of movement, but refills instantly on striking an enemy or breakable object with your melee attack. This opens up some neat combo potential, but it also becomes the basis for some truly diabolical platforming gauntlets where MIO must be kept in the air for long stretches, buoyed only by precariously slapping exploding orbs and rationing out energy for pixel-precise landings.

Outside of nail-biting movement puzzles, MIO’s other, hefty challenge comes from a number of boss fights, some on the critical path and others optionally tucked away in corners of The Vessel. Regular enemies do litter the station, but it’s these bespoke fights that have the potential to test your mettle. Each visually and thematically distinct boss tests your grasp of the game’s systems to that point, and feels like a pitch-perfect culmination of your progress – though some of the end game encounters feel tuned way too hard against folks that haven’t scraped every bit of progress from the rest of the map.

Failure is punishing too, taking away any Nacre (an upgrade currency earned by putting down enemies or found lying around) held on your person should you succumb to The Vessel’s impediments or inhabitants, but there are some great early lessons about death as an act of service and a strong conviction toward honouring a sense of will over any privilege of progress.

The Allocation Matrix further augments all of this with slottable mods that have a huge impact on how you approach exploration and combat. You’ll collect lots of these as you explore The Vessel, some that feel especially essential, but each takes up a certain capacity on the grid, so you’re pretty quickly forced to prioritise different benefits and even take on some negative effects to open up space for game-changing abilities. Equipped mods can be changed at safe points, meaning you’re able to react to what you’ve encountered or expect to encounter ahead, and it becomes a fun game of seeing just how much you can give up (including whole HUD elements) to equip that one mod that’s going to make or break a boss encounter.

Some of the most joy that I’ve gained from MIO has been chatting with other folks playing ahead of launch and sharing our experiences, discoveries and strategies. There are whole moves I might not have known about had someone not shared their approaches with me. At one point I casually mentioned how smart I felt about figuring out the relationship between a seemingly impassable door and a completely optional mod ability, only for the person I was texting to respond, “I have been trying to figure that out for DAYS.”

Admittedly, some of the biggest epiphanies during my time with MIO came more from poor delivery of information than my ability to parse it. The map, for one, is pretty unhelpful. There are attempts made at subtly highlighting potential paths and POIs without giving too much away, but it’s often unclear and sometimes outright contrary. The path ahead can sometimes feel under-explained too, with vague directions or descriptions making for frustrating circular progress until something falls into place by chance.

There’s also a lot of demand placed on the player and their ability to not only recognise combat and platforming patterns in fractions of time but execute on them in the moment, and MIO’s controls are just inconsistent enough to undermine that at the worst possible moments. Especially in the optional and end-game segments, I found myself grappling with knowing what platforming wizardry needed to be done but not finding my inputs reliable enough to make it happen the first, second or fifteenth time.

The flipside of all of this is that, in MIO, there is almost always something you can be doing or somewhere you can be exploring other than the thing that’s blocking you. And as we’ve come to expect from the genre, there are plenty of opportunities to return with some secret sauce or “a-ha!” moment discovered elsewhere that’ll finally get you over the line. There are some limited but well-considered accessibility settings that should smooth out core pain points enough to get most folks through the standard ending, and without drastically changing the game feel or vision.

Along with the core ideas that give life to The Vessel – seemingly informed by French SF writers like Laurent Genefort, surrealism and Nouveau Roman – the game’s visual style is incredibly evocative of graphic novels like Negalyod or Mécanique Céleste with its mottled palette and unique hand-shaded and painted look. It’s all 3D, but there are some neat effects going on to give it the impression of a moving, living artwork. Coupled with a sensational grasp on storytelling through framing, depth and scale it’s really a remarkable thing to witness, in a way that screenshots and even videos don’t do justice.

Art design and level design work so wonderfully close together in The Vessel, begging you pay attention to incidental details as clues and markers to make sense of your surroundings, and teaching you more about its living history as it falls around you.

Nicolas Gueguen’s score is equally important in creating the game’s distinct atmosphere, providing a moody and haunting backdrop to exploring the dankest depths of The Vessel or filling the air with energetic synths as a tough fight comes to its crescendo. It’s clear that there’s something special going on here the first time a section of Daft Punk-esque talkbox punctuates a gentle sojourn through an abandoned cityscape.

Final Thoughts

As a location, The Vessel’s parallels to a complex organism are obvious, but important, and much of MIO’s messages amount to our own relationships with legacy and memory, with mind and body, and with servitude to our individual causes. I’ll admit I had a hard time forming any attachment to immediate events in the story, but this is a sure case of the art elevating the themes, and that’s exactly the space I like to occupy.

On gameplay inspirations as well as overall vibes, I’m sure MIO will be compared endlessly to the likes of Hollow Knight, Nine Sols and Ori (the latter being the only one of those I’ve personally played), but it has something – a spark, a pearl – that defies those parallels. Maybe it’s just the French.

Reviewed on PS5 Pro // Review code supplied by publisher

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