2026 is starting with an absolute banger. MIO: Memories in Orbit is a metroidvania coming Day One to Xbox Game Pass, and it is fantastic. Following more closely to the Hollow Knight branch of the genre, this French-developed title is a beauty. As Mio, you will do your best to understand the world in which you’ve been thrust, a derelict spaceship full of misbehaving bots. It’s tough, it’s very pretty, and it sounds incredible. Let’s see if MIO is worth it for you.
Memories in Orbit
The game’s setup and lore are fascinating. Without spoiling things, you are Mio, a tiny machine awoken to help a dying vessel drifting aimlessly in space. Through (mostly non-voiced) dialogue and text logs, you’ll find out what the ship’s purpose is, what went wrong, and how to fix things. That last part is NOT easy. I rolled credits in the game roughly 11 hours or so in, and it was almost satisfying.
After looking at the achievements, I realized there was a true ending, as I had hoped. With a bit of help from the development team pointing me in the right direction, I was able to solve a few tough puzzles, learn more about what really happened, and find myself completely satisfied with the conclusion. Mio is a tough but fair title, that is, unless you go for any optional content.
This true ending is ‘optional’ and Hoo-boy, was it difficult to get. I wrapped it up in roughly 17 or so hours, with a few mysteries and optional areas left on the map. Cleaning what I could of those up added another 3-5 hours, filling in the gaps on the story, and they were somehow even tougher.
Once the title has been out for a bit, you should have the luxury of looking up guides in case you are stuck. It’s worth pushing through and finding all the answers alongside the true ending, trust me, and the gameplay only gets better.
Hair-Fu
Mio has hair-like tendrils, which become her main means of fighting and platforming. X is your attack button, letting you get three-hit combos off as often as you’d like. B lets you float in the air, either in place or in a slowly descending side-to-side style. Y is a blink-in-place dodge, with the right trigger being your grapple hook-style ability. Finally, on the left trigger, you will unlock a wall-climbing ability, and once all of these abilities and various upgrades around them are in place, you will feel like a tiny robot God of death.
As you progress through the story, you’ll unlock various modifiers, like every time you hit something, your energy is replenished. Energy is a small bar at the bottom that quickly refills whenever Mio is on the ground. Having it refill whenever you hit something means that if there are enough enemies or environmental interactables around you never have to touch the ground.
Add in the hover and wall-climb abilities, and the platforming can be as challenging as anything out there. Every time you defeat an enemy, they drop Nacre. It is this game’s ‘souls’ equivalent, and much like Hollow Knight, you can harden it at various places on the map. This means you no longer lose it when you die. Enemy variety is just high enough that I was never bored, while the boss fights range from good to flipping amazing.
Alongside the abilities are modifiers, which let you custom-tailor a playstyle to your liking. I am not great at exploration, and despite finding nearly everywhere on the map, I seemingly missed a few of them. They can add things like “have a UI” or “see enemy health” to start. Quickly, however, they move to “put a debuff on enemies when you dodge” or “gain an extra, non-stackable, pip of health when standing still for 5 seconds”.
It’s a fun system, with a beautiful, if sometimes hard-to-read UI behind it. Every time you unlock a new ability or passive, Mio will go into a digital training ground as a friend tells a somber story, and it is gorgeous, just like the rest of the game.
What Sights and Sounds
The title mixes a watercolor look with low-texture polygons in a way I can’t remember seeing often before. Mio herself is a small robot with a pearl for a head, which is loosely attached to her hair tendrils and ‘body’. All the robots are powered by their pearls, with various body shapes formed out of metals or cloth.
The Overseers at the games surprisingly limited number of checkpoints, for instance, are one giant pearl draped in a flowing, split robe. Across Xbox, the Xbox Ally X, and PC, it ran beautifully on each. On the handheld, I had to lower some settings and the resolution to maintain close to 60 fps.
Map design is both fantastic and occasionally frustrating. To get the true ending required a couple of paths that are almost entirely obscured by the game’s parallax foregrounds. Without a nudge in the right direction (and in one case a detailed video), I doubt I would have found out what to do before this embargo was up.
Again, it may not be an issue for you if you’re willing to use a guide. For those who do not want to, the game happily obfuscates what, in the end, is a glaringly obvious way to go. There is one puzzle that involves rotating a thing that I doubt I ever would have figured out without help, though.
No matter where I was or what I was doing, it was always gorgeous and sounded incredible. As good as the game looks, the soundtrack is better. There are a lot of voiced songs, especially during boss fights and ‘a-ha!’ exploration moments. The music that played during the true ending final sequence was so beautiful that I found myself distracted by it a few times.
The majority of the game is not voiced, but the main bosses and NPCs can be. When they are, there is a wide variety of localization support for it as well. You can play the game with English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese voice lines. There are a few more options for the text, like Polish and Turkish as well.
Accessibility-wise, the game offers up three options. You can make it so that after standing still for five seconds, you will be granted a non-stackable extra pip of health, similar to a late-game modifier. NPC aggression for all but bosses can be turned off, allowing you easier traversal.
Finally, you can make it so bosses are weakened after every failed attempt against them. I mainly used the extra pip of health for later game traversal sections. If you die, you go back to the last checkpoint, and often that was 15+ minutes of incredibly difficult platforming away.
Wrapping Things Up
Mysterious intrigue, tight platforming, satisfying combat, and an emotional soundtrack carry you through 20 enchanting hours. It can be overly difficult at times in its optional parts. Whether on Game Pass or a full purchase, MIO: Memories in Orbit is an incredible game and well worth checking out for any action platforming Metroidvania fan.
MIO: Memories in Orbit
Played on
Xbox Series X, Xbox Ally X, and PC
PROS
- Incredible Art Style
- Fantastic Soundtrack
- Tight Platforming
- Satisfying Combat
- Plot and Voice Acting
CONS
- ‘Optional’ Areas Can Feel Overturned
- One 'crank' puzzle feels impossible without help
