Mio: Memories in Orbit is a reminder that games can be all killer, no filler, for better or worse. A stylish side-scrolling Metroidvania, *Mio *marches to a familiar beat and wraps things up well before it could potentially grow tiresome. Its world is alluringly illustrated, and its gallery of rogues and weird little robots have their charms. Despite that, I do wish there was a bit more going on in its composition. I wish it felt denser and more layered. I’d have appreciated a bit more variety in instrumentation. I wish its lyricism hooked me more. And in the absence of these things, I found I kind of missed the filler, the noise that could have been constructed around that central, thrumming beat.

The first thing one is likely to clock about *Mio *is how gorgeous it is. It’s *very *easy to stop and stare at the landscapes in the background of nearly every one of its scenes. The Vessel, the spaceship on which *Mio *takes place, recalls the hostile and beautiful alien world of Scavengers Reign. It’s (almost) never as trippy, but it does often feel as dangerous. One second you’ll be in a lush, vegetative, and deadly jungle with strong purple hues and the next you’ll be in an azure metropolis that appears to have frozen over. Regardless of where you are, though, *Mio *is a stunner to look at, and its visuals are half the reason I explored the Vessel as deeply as I could.

Mio‘s movement: Solid fundamentals, not enough evolution

The other reason to play *Mio *is because it feels really damn good. Metroidvanias emphasize exploration, but it’d be no fun to move and fight through them if the game felt sluggish and if the combat were so-so. Luckily, *Mio *nails the fundamentals out of the gate. It’s got all the tricks one might hope for up its sleeve: a double jump that looks more like an elegant mid-air pirouette, a hookshot used for both platforming and shooting yourself across arenas in combat, an instantaneous dodge move that feels almost as satisfying as a *Sekiro *parry, a reliably weighty (and expressively animated) combo string, and more.

This mixture of silky-smooth movement and combat abilities most prominently figures into Mio‘s solid boss battles. Though none of the ones I ran into ever ran away with the show–there are plenty of hidden encounters along the game’s periphery, as well as the route to the game’s secret ending–I still had plenty of fun with each of them. Whether they were a drill-nosed mole creature burrowing into the arena or a mechanical murder doll complete with a saber and laser gun, each was stylistically distinct and demanded that I learn how to best use Mio‘s movement tech to navigate their numerous hazards long enough to see and capitalize on an attack window.

©Douze Dixièmes

I did, at times, find myself wishing that some of these encounters and arenas stood apart more. While the bosses never tread the same ground aesthetically, most of the stages themselves felt pretty same-y and the fights hit a lot of the same notes. At the end of the day, most of the arenas were square rooms with a few grapple points (save for one notable exception that breaks from this rhythm of boss fights) and most of these fights were one-on-one duels. Very few of the boss fights I did see featured environmental hazards and traps that could complicate matters and present interesting new wrinkles, and I would’ve preferred more of that variation throughout.

Maybe I’m just a masochist who really likes punishing games like Silksong and its ilk, but one thing those games I love get *really *right is their variety and breadth of enemies and encounters, and that sort of spice is sadly missing from Mio. Considering the lengths that *Mio *goes to in order to feel adjacent to the *Souls *lineage–there are bonfire-like checkpoints here, and more than enough enigmatic worldbuilding to go around–it’s a bit of a shame it doesn’t go that step further, especially on the game’s most obvious and critical path.

Speaking of a lack of variety, I was disappointed in how little Mio‘s combat ever grows. There are modifications you can make that alter certain attributes, like one upgrade that allows Mio to do a heavy attack immediately after landing a hookshot, but besides that, you never earn new techniques or weapons. There is no additional combo to learn by traveling off the beaten path. There is no projectile with which to occasionally pepper an enemy from afar.

Samus has missiles to complement her pea shooter. Castlevania‘s numerous protagonists can begin the game with a great variety of weapons, like axes, swords, or whips. Mega Man absorbs the powers of the robot masters he defeats. Juan of *Guacamelee *gains entirely new wrestling techniques and Ori regularly picks up stunning new magical powers. The Knight of Hollow Knight can use charge attacks as well as a highly-effective magic blast and a dive move with a massive area-of-effect, and Hornet gains new traps, tools, and crests that fundamentally alter her moveset.

By comparison, Mio is stuck with their same little saber and three-attack combo for the entirety of the game. The lack of imagination here doesn’t significantly take away from the game, but I did find myself less enthused with the prospect of combat in Mio‘s late stretches, in large part because it had plateaued so early.

A mystery without mystique

And while I’m speaking of aspects of the game that regrettably fall flat, I really wish Mio’s narrative went…anywhere. The Vessel is an ark ship meant to ferry a colony and their robots (who look a *lot *like Pascal from Nier: Automata and fill the ranks of the game’s cast) across the stars in search of a new world. Partway through the journey though, the Voices—AI that served as deities and guides to the robots and are named after body parts like the Spine and the Hand—cease function, allowing the Vessel and its inhabitants to fall into disrepair as the ship drifts. The great mystery of the game is figuring out what exactly happened to cause the AIs to stop and go quiet.

Despite its early promise, though,* Mio*‘s writing just didn’t hook me. The game’s story is largely explained in lore tomes found through exploration and following the game’s main story path, but even these missives fail to inject the proceedings with a sense of urgency or dramatic tension. Normally, I’d fear that I just don’t get the story, but in the case of Mio, I do, save for whatever revelations the game’s out-of-the way “true” ending might hold. However, the morsels of story that *Mio *delivered never quite lived up to the mystique that it spent so long building up, and I found myself quite disappointed in the answers and resolutions afforded to the conflicts and characters by the tale’s end.

Mio: Memories in Orbit

Back-of-the-box quote:

“Lo-fi beats to Metroid to.”

developer:

Douze Dixièmes

type of game:

Metroidvania

Liked:

Arresting visual style, fluid combat and movement, really fun boss battles.

Disliked:

Story fails to build any momentum, lack of variety in combat.

Platforms:

PC (played on), PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch.

Release date:

January 20, 2026

Played:

Rolled credits at about 17 hours, but spent about 20+ hours working towards the secret ending before moving on.

Its characters, what little there are in settings like Metropolis and the Haven, feel like one-note bit players in the game’s grander machinations. The Voices themselves are less pronounced throughout the story than I’d hoped for. Even* Mio*‘s allies fail to leap off the page. Despite my initial efforts to see as much of the game as possible and give it the chance to change my mind, I simply could not feign any more interest in securing a more hopeful resolution to the ills of a cast that felt so amorphous and under-developed.

Suffice it to say, Mio doesn’t quite tick off all the boxes of what I’m looking for in a Metroidvania. It’s got mystery and intrigue enough to incentivize you to look in corners and dart around its imaginatively rendered sci-fi utopia gone awry, but not quite enough to pay off the threads it establishes early on. Mio’s middle action is defined by a great run of abilities that make cutting a path through the Vessel a joy in the moment, as well as bosses that pose an admirable challenge despite their humdrum layouts. But as the journey comes to a close, the sameness of its encounters and simplistic combat closes out the story on a bit of a whimper where a bang might’ve felt more appropriate.

*Mio *is stylish and elegant to boot, but that and a decent grasp of the fundamentals are not enough to deepen my appreciation of what’s ultimately a pretty by-the-numbers Metroidvania. It’s an adherent to the form, but I rarely like the tune it sings, and don’t quite love it despite my efforts to.