I just lately chanced on Erostasis, a superb and filthy cybernetic microgame wherein you’re a wiry meatpuppet created to, aha, fulfill the urges of an exceedingly backed-up bionic starship. Over the course of a really busy 20 minutes or so, you go to numerous self-aware ship programs 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 inventory footage. It’s superb. Most likely don’t play it the place members of the general public can see.
Anyway, if I have been to decide on a polar reverse of that recreation it may be new metroidvania Mio: Reminiscences In Orbit, which additionally takes place on a dwelling ship and is as elegant and videogamey and serenely sexless as Erostasis is subversive and debauched. I actually just like the seems of Mio, too, for wholly totally different causes, and I’m tickled pink that publishers Focus Leisure have managed to e-mail me about it whereas I’m nonetheless recovering from my Erostasis expertise.
Created by Shady Part Of Me builders Douze Dixièmes, Reminiscences In Orbit casts you as a fragile however highly effective android exploring an infinite, artisanal area ark whose AI caretakers have ceased functioning. Over the course of presumably many centuries, the vessel’s innards have exploded right into a wilderness of cosmic vegetation.
The visuals take inspiration from “comics, work and anime”, and are set to “lo-fi beats and choral melodies”. They remind me a teeny little bit of Biblical beat ‘em up El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. There’s an analogous, faerie frailty to the setting, with warmly painted structure and equipment bleaching or darkening to pencil strokes within the backdrop. Mio herself strikes and fights with the help of golden tendrils rising from her cranium. These are very a lot not the sorts of tendrils you encounter in Erostasis, a recreation wherein it’s typically tough to inform one physique half from one other.
Its uncommonly clever artwork path apart, Mio appears fairly routine for a metroidvania. There are talents and modifiers to accumulate, new areas or shortcuts to entry with these talents, pleasant robots to restore for lore and upgrades, a bestiary of 30 enemy models, and 15 bossfights. The trailer suggests that you simply’ll do lots of chaining collectively strikes to beat sequences of obstacles and construct a combo. Once more, all fairly acquainted, however persuasively executed.
Mio: Reminiscences In Orbit launches this 12 months, in accordance with the Steam page. It and Erostasis be a part of final 12 months’s seedy sarcophagus Ultros within the pantheon of video games set on dwelling starships. I’m fervently hoping that we’re in the midst of some sort of floral fleshcruiser renaissance. I am making an attempt to work out which format or style I would like subsequent. Possibly a bioship life sim? The place you must fear about mobile mitosis and deep area photosynthesis, moderately than managing a crew?
