The place where I grew up has a body. To anyone passing through on the way to Boston, it may look like every other small town in Massachusetts, but I know what’s underneath the skin. Main Street is its spine, forming a sturdy backbone protected by libraries and barber shops. Smaller streets jut off in all directions to form a full skeleton. There’s a central nervous system that runs from the local high school to the Catholic church. I’ve spent so much time there that I know where every muscle is, where every nerve is. Even if decades of cosmetic surgery have reconstructed its historic landmarks, all I have to do is stand in the center of town and listen to the heartbeat to find my way.
My favorite video game locations have bodies, too. When I zoom all the way out on Hollow Knight: Silksong’s sprawling map, Pharloom is abstracted into a complex system of veins that carry blood to its heart, The Citadel. It’s why I find myself continually drawn to 2D action-adventure games like Silksong; a great Metroidvania is an anatomy class in which you get to dissect a new body. And Mio: Memories in Orbit captures that appeal better than most of its peers.
Mio: Memories in Orbit, the latest game from Shady Part of Me developer Douze Dixièmes, is a meat-and-potatoes kind of Metroidvania. There are no gimmicks to its straightforward 2D platforming, and it’s not out to subvert the format with an unlikely genre mash-up. Instead, it is committed to the act of exploration to a surgical degree. To survive its ship full of rogue machines is to become a digital cadaver of a gorgeously intricate digital world.
The mysterious story takes place aboard The Vessel, an ark full of robots that has been abandoned and left floating through space. Somewhere amid the debris, there’s Mio: a pint-sized bot with wires protruding from its head like strands of hair. After crawling through some narrow vents and landing in the core of the ship, a central structure dubbed The Spine, Mio sets off on a journey to restore the ship’s robotic caretakers (named Pearls) and save The Vessel from imminent doom. It’s a sparse and moody story filled out by a smattering of collectible logs that detail the plight of the machines onboard.
There’s a lot of dry sci-fi jargon to sort through, but the story provides the necessary tablesetting for its sturdy Metroidvania structure. Mio travels through the ship’s eerie biomes in search of the Pearls, all while picking up traversal abilities, collecting health upgrades, and taking down the occasional boss. On the genre spectrum, Mio is much more indebted to Ori and the Blind Forest than it is to Hollow Knight — and that’s refreshing in 2026. The focus isn’t on sweaty battles against dozens of ultra-tough enemies. There are still some hard robo-bosses that take some practice to defeat with Mio’s plinky hairpin, of course, but every fight is achievable, the difficulty curve is masterful, and smart accessibility considerations — like the ability to automatically make a boss fight a little easier every time you die — allow you to gradually bring down the challenge with each defeat without switching to an easy mode.
Each time I unclog an elevator or find the backside of a locked door, it’s like I’m suturing the wounds on a body.
Instead, Mio is more interested in fluid exploration that’s continually cracked open by a widening movement kit. The Vessel is constructed from platforming puzzles, requiring me to chain together my jumps, glides, pogo slashes, and more in the increasingly creative dances that are necessary for reaching collectibles. Some of those objects are well-hidden too, cleverly cloaked by dense layers of broken machinery that reward players who poke and prod at every scenic detail. Persistent exploration often leads to caches of currency, which can be spent on playstyle-altering upgrades that can be installed into Mio’s upgradable memory bank. My own loadout revolved around intentionally slowing down how fast my energy recharged, giving myself a damage boost every time that gauge wasn’t topped off.
While that’s all fairly standard for the genre, Mio makes its mark with its setting. It’s not just that the 2D landscapes are visually mesmerizing, illustrated in a style that makes every environment look like it was painstakingly penciled in by hand — just one of the many ways that Douze Dixièmes draws a line between the mechanical and the human. The Vessel is an intricately designed series of pathways that connect back to one another with scientific efficiency. Early in my adventure, I’m frustrated when it appears that death sends me back to one single checkpoint in The Spine. (I drop all of my currency when dying, but I don’t have to do a corpse run to retrieve it, and some helpful bots will make anything I’m carrying undroppable free of charge.) The more I explore, I discover unexpected shortcuts that lead my right back to The Spine. The runbacks to distant bosses become shorter as I find new ways to fast-track myself through the ship’s bloodstream.
Despite being a giant machine, the Vessel begins to feel like an organic body the more I explore. It’s a feeling Mio even makes quite literal with the Pearls; each one is named after a different bodily function. The ship has eyes, it breathes, and everything connects back to that central Spine. Each time I unclog an elevator or find the backside of a locked door, it’s like I’m suturing the wounds on a body. I look over the fully discovered map like a surgeon by the end of my adventure, relieved by the sound of stable vitals as my work wraps up.
Mio isn’t the first game to pull off that trick. Notably, 2024’s psychedelic Ultros similarly fuses the mechanical with the organic to imagine a video game map as a living being in even more explicit terms. I’d go as far as to say that the entire Metroidvania genre is built around that idea in some way. Mio’s Spine feels spiritually linked to Axiom Verge’s own central backbone that connects its disparate biomes like a small town’s Main Street. The genre’s best games understand that exploration isn’t just a thing you have to do to seek out more battles; it’s an act of anatomy.
Mio: Memories in Orbit brings that idea to the forefront in the kind of immaculately constructed 2D adventure that belongs on any Metroidvania Mount Rushmore. Not a single hair on its head is out of place. Every nook aboard The Vessel has its function, each one crucial to a delicately crafted ecosystem’s continued health. What a pleasure it is to really live in that space like that rather than conquer it for a change; for the corridors of a video game map to be etched into your skin like the lines on your palms, committed to memory like a map of your hometown.
Mio: Memories in Orbit will be released Jan. 20 on Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Steam Deck using a prerelease download code provided by Focus Entertainment. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
