MIO: Memories in Orbit – Beautiful, Polished, but Marred by Frustrating Decisions
- Antal Bokor
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Metroidvania games are surging. I’d love to call it a renaissance, but honestly, it’s mostly a flood of titles hybridizing old-school exploration with Soulslike mechanics, all chasing the ghost of Hollow Knight. MIO: Memories in Orbit does exactly this, right down to the cryptic storytelling. Yet, it’s not worse off for it. Despite embracing every trope of its genre, MIO stands out as a solid, beautiful example—though it is marred by quirks that are clearly driving players away.
MIO is not a bad game. It does little to reinvent the wheel, but that works to its benefit. The controls are tight, the mechanics are high quality, and it feels genuinely great to play. While it submits to genre conventions, it occasionally subverts them smartly. For instance, there is no immediate dodge mechanic. You do unlock one, but not until you’re a significant chunk of the way through. This forces you to handle early confrontations with spacing and movement rather than relying on i-frame spamming.
However, the DNA of Dark Souls feels less like an inspiration here and more like a ghost haunting the design. You collect Nacre (souls) which you lose upon death unless you’ve "crystallized" (banked) it. There are curveballs—no corpse run to retrieve lost currency, for one—but MIO leans hard into the genre's least accessible traits: brutal boss fights and demanding platforming.
Early on, MIO feels surprisingly fair. I’d almost call it easy, or at least welcoming; it seems to want you to win. Maybe I’m just someone with less patience or time these days, but I crave that feeling of continuous forward progress. MIO delivers that feeling perfectly—until it slams into a wall. The game takes a sudden, jarring turn toward difficulty that feels less like a challenge and more like a punishment.
Getting lost is standard for a Metroidvania, but getting stuck because a path is obscured by foreground art is frustrating. I found myself halted not by a puzzle, but because I missed an entrance hidden behind the game’s own beautiful visuals. Based on the achievement data I was seeing, I’m not alone. Before I was even a third of the way through, my progression achievements were already flagged as "Rare," with less than 5% of players reaching that point. While early achievement data can be skewed, it suggests a massive early drop-off. The signposting is weak, and often I struggled to understand how a new upgrade was the key to an old obstacle. When it works, it’s brilliant—asking you to use an upgrade in a surprising way—but these moments are rare.
The biggest offender, however, is the "Corruption" mechanic. As the story progresses, the game permanently removes segments of your health bar. While this makes narrative sense (the world is decaying), it feels terrible as a player to be permanently downgraded. It is especially egregious when you have spent hard-earned currency to buy health upgrades, only to have them effectively deleted. It leads to a bitter mindset in close fights: "I would have survived that hit if the game hadn't stolen my health." It’s more than just the health downgrade, though; it’s the opportunity cost. There are items I explicitly chose to forgo in order to spend my currency on health, only to have that investment taken away. It just doesn’t feel great.
That said, MIO is gorgeous. I really dug its "future machine meets spiritualism" aesthetic. I don’t usually dedicate sections of reviews to graphics unless they are stellar, and MIO is both stellar and noteworthy. The soundtrack is also a highlight—easily my favorite of the year so far.
MIO comes agonizingly close to being an early Game of the Year contender for me. If not for a few hostile design decisions, it would likely make my "Best of 2026" list. If you are a die-hard fan of Metroidvanias with patience to spare, definitely check out MIO: Memories in Orbit. For everyone else, be warned: this beautiful machine has sharp edges.
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