Some games arrive as a burst of sensation and pure delight: a handful of images and emotions and ideas that wordlessly create a mood. This is Mio: Memories in Orbit. This game is Mucha-like hair billowing in zero G. It’s a cluster of pearls and twills of off-cut brass twisting around the chill reaches of outer space. It’s the future, or perhaps the weird cybernetic past, inspired by Art Nouveau. It’s warm metal forming stamens and petals and entire gardens. The whole thing’s gorgeous and sad and filled with visual cleverness.
It’s also a Metroidvania – and with it there comes a reminder that Metroidvanias are the most elegant of games. They have maps that reveal themselves in darting headlong stretches, while the greater structure slowly curls ever-outwards. Metroidvanias are about looking at a world that you thought you already knew, and learning to see the fresh potential that’s been threaded through it.
Mio does all this stuff wonderfully. I’m still in the early game, but this is already a beautiful adventure. Cast as a tiny robot left to explore a huge, dormant spaceship, the game kicks off with platform gauntlets drawn in sharp lines of gold pen as you learn to jump and double-jump. Only when that’s mastered does the wider world fade in with all its complex organic dereliction – but even now, shadows arrive as bursts of delicate cross-hatching. The idea remains that you’re exploring a landscape that is in the process of being drawn into existence.
And what a landscape. Early stages allow you to scrabble through cable-strewn passages and then out, suddenly, across gaping bridges where huge machines sleep in the distance. An ice biome arrives, but rather than simply chilling you until you take damage and forcing you to duck falling icicles, you’re more concerned with managing speed and inertia as the ground itself becomes a rippling ramp that allows you to launch yourself across vast distances and avoid toxic pits of spikes.
Enemies, meanwhile, are brass and lightbulbs, dashing and rolling and scuttling and lunging. An early power-up allows you to see their health bars, but even the simplest and most ridiculous of these foes can still end a promising run of exploration with a well-swung hammer. I’ve just encountered a sort of animatronic hummingbird, and I was so taken with watching it that I gave it ample time to peck me to pieces.
Coming post-Silksong, Mio feels like a reprieve and a revelation. Silksong is deeply wonderful, of course, but it’s a pleasure to be exploring a place that’s not quite so devoted to causing me harm. If anything, Mio replaces the thrilling pressure of constant game-ending threat with a different kind of panic. I move so far on a single life, and explore so many branching paths – leaving so many other paths unvisited – that I end up with that kind of spatial and memory-based anxiety only the most wide-reaching and intricate games can deliver. How will I ever find my way back here? How will I remember to follow up on everything I’m ignoring for the time being?
These are good problems to have when a game provides such an interesting set of spaces to explore, and when it gives you such pleasure in the light-footed way you move through them. I loved Silksong very much, but afterwards I did feel like I needed a break from Metroidvanias, just for a bit. Mio makes me realise that I was wrong.
