As our review for the excellent MIO: Memories in Orbit goes live, I was lucky enough to interview Sarah Hourcade, the game’s Executive Producer. We discussed her inspiration, the game’s beautiful artstyle, being on Game Pass, and more.
Journalist: Jesse Norris | Spokesperson/people: Sarah Hourcade, Executive Producer on MIO
Inspirations
Jesse: The Metroidvania genre is stacked with incredible games. What were some of your inspirations on how to give fans what they expect while offering up new experiences?
Sarah: We took inspiration from several games during production and not all of them metroidvanias. The most important ones would be Control, Haiku the robot, Ori, Hollow Knight, Celeste, Tunic and Dark Souls.
Metroidvanias generally have three pillars: platforming, combat and exploration. We obviously worked a lot on each of them but the one that was the most important for us, that we talked about again and again and that led to huge changes in the game, is Exploration.
It’s also (almost by luck because we never thought about it this way) what makes MIO different from most of the other metroidvanias.
Art Style
Jesse: I was struck by the art style while playing. How did you come up with this game’s unique look?
Sarah: From the very start of the project four and a half years ago, our vision was to craft a sci-fi game exploring themes of life and robots, while pushing the boundaries of watercolor rendering – first introduced in Shady Part of Me – to create an organic, immersive aesthetic. The graphic design took precedence over gameplay, drawing early inspiration from European comics and artists like Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Christophe Chabouté, Catherine Meurisse, and Juan Guarnido, as well as animated films such as Ernest & Célestine.
Our core goal was to build a 3D world that constantly evoked the sensation of navigating a hand-drawn 2D illustration, achieved not through traditional textures, but via procedural outlines, watercolor patches, and post-processing effects like fog and particles. This artistic ambition demanded extensive collaboration between art and tech teams, balancing personal taste, technical feasibility, and clear level design.
Every playable area was meticulously iterated to ensure intuitive navigation, avoiding player confusion in complex 3D environments, while reserving the most expansive and visually rich settings for moments of respite – following combat or boss arenas, which remain deliberately schematic and uncluttered.
The final result is a delicate equilibrium between narrative impact, technical constraints, and hopefully fluid gameplay.
Douze Dixièmes
Jesse: Please tell us a bit about the team. As a smaller developer, how was it to work with Focus Entertainment as a publisher?
Sarah: We’re a very atypical team coming from several different horizons. The core team is made of around 15 people from building construction, animation studios, MIT, landscape architecture, printing, chemistry and of course a minority of us came from the video game industry xD
We started working with Focus for our first game, Shady Part of Me in 2019 and it went really well. We were very happy to keep working with them. There are those weird moments of course where we both realize that our scale differences make communication a bit complicated but most of the time, and since everyone is trying their best to make it work, we just talk through it.
It helps a lot that their offices are a 20 minutes tramway journey from ours because we can just see each other a lot and sometimes, when something gets too complicated we just go talk to each other, have a coffee and sort things out ^^
In the end, it’s a very good partnership!
Being in Game Pass Day One
Jesse: Has the deal with Xbox Game Pass changed anything for the studio during development and beyond?
Sarah: It was very reassuring to know that they loved and trusted the game enough to offer this deal ! We’re obviously full of doubt and it was one of those big things that told us that we made a good experience and Xbox trusted that people would like it.
The Future
Jesse: Are there any plans for future content in the title? Without spoiling much, the true ending feels rather definitive in a few ways.
Sarah: There is some content that we could push a little and we have some ideas that could be interesting but we try not to think about it too much and we’re mostly planning on taking a rest after this release 🙂
And of course watch every stream, review and comment about the game for the month to come 😂
You can find my full review HERE. MIO: Memories in Orbit is now available on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC and is an Xbox Play Anywhere Game Pass title.
