The dichotomy of the Metroidvania as a genre is an interesting one. Its world is always ruined, cruel, hostile, perhaps once beautiful, now broken, but the genre asks you to imagine that it wasn’t always that way. That it was beautiful, once, worthwhile, and that no matter how hostile it is now, it might be something you can survive, something you can conquer. You must hold both of these ideas in your head simultaneously if the genre is to make sense. The Metroidvania is a genre of imitation, of something that reminds of something else. You must be able to imagine that the world of the Metroidvania could be a happy one for the trick to work.

MIO: Memories in Orbit is no exception. You take control of Mio, a sentient machine aboard the Vessel. The Vessel was designed to transport humans to a place called the Promised Land, but all the humans are gone. Dead or missing or something else entirely; initially, you do not know. All that remain are the machines built to take care of them.

The ship is falling apart; shards of ice break through the floor of Metropolis, rivaling the city-in-a-ship’s tallest towers. The Haven, a garden of beautiful flora and fauna is lush, overgrown, bursting at its confines. Vines cover elevators, block paths. The water is sour. Hostile, hungry plants lash out at anything that comes too close. Hostile machines attack on sight. The inner workings of the ship are crushed, broken, fragmented. Tremors rock the ship, damaging and destroying everything on-board. Everyone, and everything, seems doomed. But Mio is small. She can fit through the cracks, find what others miss. She is resourceful. She finds hidden things, upgrades her systems to give herself a fighting chance. And she is not alone.

Her goal is to find the Pearls, essentially the ship’s overseers – they have names like The Eye and The Breath, The Spine and The Blood; they are the heart of the ship, living beings that constitute a greater whole – and gather their Voices. By doing so, perhaps she can save the machines still aboard.

The world of the Vessel is MIO’s greatest accomplishment. The Vessel feels like a real place, something grand now broken, the paths you traverse the result of a dying thing reshaping itself, breaking and reforming in new ways. To explore the Vessel is to come to love it and its inhabitants, to find lost diaries and letters and musings, to be offered kindness and give it in return. It sometimes feels artificial in the way Metroidvanias do: you’ll come to something you cannot reach, and know almost exactly what would need to change for you to be able to. Later, you will find it, and it’s probably the thing you expect it to be. This is a genre problem, not a MIO problem, and it is enough to be noticeable but not enough to detract from what MIO does well. The writing is simple, succinct, and often beautiful. The other machines aboard the Vessel are afraid, and many have given up. But what else is there to do but go on? Mio herself is silent, relentless. But you see her character in what she offers everyone around her.

As a story, as a world, MIO sings. As a video game you play, it is a bog-standard Metroidvania Soulslike. Mio gains resources called Nacre for killing enemies, who revive whenever she attunes with the ship. She can use that Nacre to buy upgrades that she can equip in limited slots and loses it when she dies. Initially, this seems to help revive parts of the ship. After a while, it just means dying loses resources you cannot get back. The upgrade system is interesting in theory, and less so in practice. You will likely never unequip the upgrade that allows Mio to sustain an extra hit, nor the one that causes the final hit of your three-hit combo (because of course it is a three-hit combo) to do more damage. Sure, you could equip the thing that gives you five extra slots (each ability takes so many slots to equip) in exchange for being unable to use the healing basins, but why would you? Likewise, you could de-equip your ability to see Mio’s health bar (why is this even an ability?) for five additional slots, but… why? What you’ll want is often very obvious, extra slots are fairly hard to come by unless you can find them, and you’ll probably find a build early and stick with it.

Like most Metroidvanias, though, what lets MIO down is its combat. You’d better learn to love Mio’s three-hit combo, because you’ll be doing it a lot. Standard enemies fall quickly, but the combat’s weaknesses come into focus in the boss fights. MIO’s bosses share many of the same moves: a charge, an attack that sends things falling from the ceiling, the ability to teleport or go underground or move quickly, forcing you to reposition in a hurry. Every fight feels the same; each forces you to be reactive. None ever lets you set the tone. Dodge. Whiff punish. Three-hit combo. Repeat ad infinitum. There is, thankfully, the ability to jump cancel hits, which opens up some interesting possibilities – one boss spun in place, shooting ice from opposite ends, and I beat him by getting to a safe place and repeatedly jump canceling my three-hit combo – but there is no real sauce here. Yes, the hairpin allows you to pull Mio to enemies and the dodge feels good and so on, but nothing here is interesting, or even really challenging. It is simply pattern recognition, and those patterns repeat often. Simon Says do this. Bop It on a screen.

What’s worse is the bosses have an enormous amount of health, and you’ll have to land your three-hit combo dozens of times to take one down. At one point, I equipped the ability that allowed me to see enemy health and realized I was barely doing damage when I hit them, even with abilities that upped how hard Mio could swing. Boss fights became endurance runs, and when I lost, it often wasn’t because I didn’t know how to do the fight, or because what I was being asked to do was challenging. It was because I was so bored and fights were so long that I was taking unnecessary chances to try to make them go faster. And of course bosses, and even bigger standard enemies, are utterly unaffected by your attacks. There is no hitstun. At any point, one of them can yell “Mom said it’s my turn to play Xbox!” and power through whatever you’re doing to hit you. Often, I wished MIO didn’t have combat at all.

Platforming through the world is better, but near the end of the game, sections become Simon Says gauntlets that require you to solve extended challenges just so. This is more acceptable in platforming because many of the best platformers are often just obstacle courses, but by the end MIO just feels mean in both combat and platforming, requiring you to execute a pattern without any opportunity to express yourself through play. Again, none of these challenges are interesting or particularly even hard. They’re just pattern recognition and execution. There is little room for interesting play.

MIO: Memories in Orbit takes place in a fascinating world, and its story is often beautiful. If there was no combat, it would be a substantially better game. But there is, and it is not. Like all Metroidvanias, MIO: Memories in Orbit asks you to imagine the Vessel as a place that was once wondrous. But I could not imagine a world where I was happy to play in its ruins, no matter how beautiful what’s left of it was.

This review is based on a PC code provided by the publisher. MIO: Memories in Orbit releases on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2 on January 20th, 2026.

Will Borger

Contributing Editor

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been covering games since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His games writing has also appeared at IGN, TechRadar, Into the Spine, Lifebar, PCGamesN, The Loadout, and elsewhere. He lives in New York with his wife and dreams of owning a dog. You can find him on X @bywillborger.

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