I recently stumbled on Erostasis, a brilliant and filthy cybernetic microgame in which you are a wiry meatpuppet created to, aha, satisfy the urges of an exceedingly backed-up bionic starship. Over the course of a very busy 20 minutes or so, you visit various self-aware ship systems and play out their kinks. The writing is clattery, theory-drenched and sensual, set to moaning electronica. The visuals are a gunky collage of seeming porno and industrial stock footage. It’s glorious. Probably don’t play it where members of the public can see.
Anyway, if I were to choose a polar opposite of that game it might be new metroidvania Mio: Memories In Orbit, which also takes place on a living ship and is as elegant and videogamey and serenely sexless as Erostasis is subversive and debauched. I really like the looks of Mio, too, for wholly different reasons, and I’m tickled pink that publishers Focus Entertainment have managed to email me about it while I’m still recovering from my Erostasis experience.
Created by Shady Part Of Me developers Douze Dixièmes, Memories In Orbit casts you as a delicate but powerful android exploring an enormous, artisanal space ark whose AI caretakers have ceased functioning. Over the course of presumably many centuries, the vessel’s innards have exploded into a wilderness of cosmic vegetation.
The visuals take inspiration from “comics, paintings and anime”, and are set to “lo-fi beats and choral melodies”. They remind me a teeny bit of Biblical beat ‘em up El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. There’s a similar, faerie frailty to the setting, with warmly painted architecture and machinery bleaching or darkening to pencil strokes in the backdrop. Mio herself moves and fights with the aid of golden tendrils emerging from her skull. These are very much not the kinds of tendrils you encounter in Erostasis, a game in which it is generally difficult to tell one body part from another.
Its uncommonly artful art direction aside, Mio seems pretty routine for a metroidvania. There are abilities and modifiers to acquire, new areas or shortcuts to access with those abilities, friendly robots to repair for lore and upgrades, a bestiary of 30 enemy units, and 15 bossfights. The trailer suggests that you’ll do a lot of chaining together moves to overcome sequences of obstacles and build a combo. Again, all quite familiar, but persuasively executed.
Mio: Memories In Orbit launches this year, according to the Steam page. It and Erostasis join last year’s seedy sarcophagus Ultros in the pantheon of games set on living starships. I am fervently hoping that we’re in the middle of some kind of floral fleshcruiser renaissance. I’m trying to work out which format or genre I’d like next. Maybe a bioship life sim? Where you have to worry about cellular mitosis and deep space photosynthesis, rather than managing a crew?
