is my most anticipated metroidvania for what’s left of 2025. Its hand-drawn art style, the simple but tight combat, and the intricacies of its world design🃏 amazed me when I played the beginning hours of it earlier this year. While Hollow Knight: Silksong is still scheduled for a release somewhere later this year, I’m not falling for it anymore. This game promises to be a special addition to the genre, ꦛand I actually believe it’s coming out this year.

Inspired by Hollow Knight and the Ori series, MIO is the second game developed by 🦩French studio Douze Dixièmes. Its previous title, Shady Part of Me, already showed a distinctive art design, but the platformer was a more linear and straightforward experience. ✱Something that the team wanted to change in their second project.

“While we still love [Shady Part of Me], it was really only made to be played once or twice,” game director Oscar Blu🍌mberg told TheGamer. “With that in mind, we set out to do the opposite: a very non-linear game with a super high skill ceiling. We defi😼nitely underestimated how much harder it would be. We had to learn how to make large-scale level design, bosses, nonlinear storytelling, etc.”

In my couple of hours exploring the Vessel, the mas🐬sive spaceship that acts as the setting to the main scenario, I did many things, but mostly one: getting lost. You start the game with only a hint of where you sh♕ould go, without a map, and it’s up to you to figure out the correct way and find the myriad branching parts of the different biomes.

How To Design Exciting Mazes

When asked about the challenges of creating a metroidvania, Blumberg noted that the team started with general ideas, such as some key locations, the visual identity of biomes, how you should travel through them, and what sweet rewards will make 🃏you want to keep making progress.

These elꦜements make up the “basic blueprint” to develop the scale and scope of the game. You also need to know when to add sections and challenges that teach the player how to use a new ability, develop a specific skill, and start mastering the mechanics.

“Then came iterations,” exp😼lains Blumberg. “Playtests are crucial to understand what works and what doesn't. We tried to ⭕balance (as well as we could) frustration and awe to make sure some of the gameplay gates, plot points, and environments became more impactful and memorable.

“We try to make 🌳the players feel a little lost, without being overwhelmed. Making sure they end up identifying landmarks and remembering shortcuts was a challenge in itself.”

A Map? We Don't Need Maps

When it comes to finding those landmarks aꦜnd shortcuts, the aforementioned lack of a map was the first thing to catch my attention. There was a menu for one, but I didn’t find any after playing for two hours. Blumberg explains that a previous iteration of the game gave you a map from the beginning, but it went against the intention of making you feel lost.

“We do know that this will be a source of frustration for some players,” says Blumberg. “We want [players] to pay attention to the universe they are in and not watch its map all the time.” If that wasn’t enough, Blumberg adds that once you do get the map, it won’t automatically update as you make prog🌼ress, like most maps in metroidvanias. You will be able to use it as a reference, but paying attention to the scenario around you will be the key to your exploration.

He also shared a few design rules that the team has joked about using previously that they put into play on MIO: "Always see the door before the key," "any backtra𒁏cking should have a twist," and "there is no lim🗹it to how many floors an elevator can have".

Exploration and level design are perhaps the most essential🐽 ingredients in a metroidvania, but if you don’t add an appealing art style and compositions enhance your exploring, your game won’t🗹 stand out.

Adding Beauty To Your Metroidvania

“Our main goal was to create a 3D world that gives th💧e feeling of exploring a 2D drawing at each moment,” explains art director Marc Lericolais. “There are actually no textures in the game. The visuals are the results of 3D assets, the engine rendering of these assets, a lot of staging and post-process, like fog or particles. It’s a mixture of outlines to mimic line art and hide the 3D feel and watercolor patꦿches.”

Composer Nicolas Gueguen tells me about the melancholic vibes that the music creates in the game, highlighting the feeling of being lost in an unknown world. Most of the early exploration uses electronic instruments, but as you find new areas, you’ll start hearing human choirs representing the lost humanity. He also explain🍎s that you won’t hear any percussion during your exploration, but this appears in boss fights, creating a heavy contrast.

MIO: Memories in Orbit doesn’t have a release dateꦡ yet, but you can play the two-hour-long demo right now on Steam and lose yourself in its world, like its developers want.