The Indie Parkour Game That’s Hard to Put Down
When I dropped a Short of MOTORSLICE on the socials a few weeks back, one of the comments was a quick observation that “movement looks a bit clunky.” It picked up a couple of likes and stuck with me, because after spending some decent time with the game, I can confirm that yes, the movement is sometimes clunky. But the wider thing the commentor didn’t quite capture is that MOTORSLICE is also one of the most distinct and quietly compelling indie games of 2026 so far, and the clunkiness is the price of admission rather than the deciding factor.
MOTORSLICE is a third-person parkour-and-combat game from Brazilian indie studio Regular Studio, published by Top Hat Studios. It’s been compared to everything from Shadow of the Colossus to Mirror’s Edge to Nier: Automata, and the comparisons are all earned even if none of them really pin down what the game is.
The Setup
You play as P, a Slicer dropped into a vast, empty megastructure with the brief of destroying every machine inside. Your only companion is a hovering drone called Orbie, voiced through the game’s only sustained voice performance (Kira Buckland, doing some of her best work). The lore implies a post-human world where construction machines have gone rogue and somebody has decided that P is the person to clean them up.
What that “somebody” wants, why P agreed, and what any of it actually means are deliberately left vague. MOTORSLICE doesn’t believe in handing you its world on a plate, which is either thrilling or frustrating depending on how patient you are. I landed somewhere in the middle. By the closing chapter I wanted more context than the game was willing to give me, but I also accepted that the ambiguity is part of the design rather than a hole in it.
The World Earns the Hype
The first thing every review mentions and the first thing I want to talk about. The megastructure is glorious. Brutalist concrete pillars stretching into mists, brilliant blue-sky vistas glimpsed through dark corridors, vast architectural geometry that exists more to suggest impossible scale than to be physically navigable. It feels closer to a piece of speculative architecture than a video game environment, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give it.
Regular Studio has taken the unusual decision to use Unreal Engine 5 not for photorealism but for restraint. Surfaces are simple, textures are minimal, the colour palette is muted, and the result is a world that lands harder emotionally than most thirty-million-dollar productions manage. There’s a recurring visual motif where darkness closes around P and then opens into a new cavern of light, and it never stopped landing for me. Easily the best-looking indie game I’ve played this year.
The sound design carries the same ambition. The score leans on cool electronic ambience, the diegetic audio of chainsaw against metal is genuinely satisfying, and the small audio cues (P’s gasps when she dies and reboots, Orbie’s clipped tones, the wind across the structures) all add to a sense of place that’s rare in a game this size.
The Motorslice Mechanic
This is the headline gameplay verb and where the game earns its name. P carries a chainsaw, and certain shaded panels around the world can be sliced into and ridden vertically or horizontally as a kind of mechanised wall-run. When it works, and most of the time it does, it feels properly cinematic. You stitch together jumps and slices and wall-runs into a flow state that wouldn’t look out of place in The Matrix.
The standard parkour around it covers all the moves you’d expect from the genre. Double jumps, ledge grabs, wall-runs, vaults, the lot. None of it is reinventing the wheel, but most of it feels good in the moment, and the Motorslice itself is the spice that makes the package worth eating.
Where It Stumbles
Now the clunkiness, because there’s no point pretending it isn’t there.
Movement has a slightly inconsistent edge that becomes more obvious the longer you play. Jumps have a floaty tail that occasionally over-shoots small platforms. Wall-runs sometimes lock you into a direction you didn’t quite mean. Pole climbing is introduced in a way that left me re-doing the same section three times to work out what the game wanted from me. None of these are catastrophic, but they’re real, and on precision sections they bite.
The bigger problem, and the one every other review I’ve read flags, is the camera. When you’re motor-slicing in a straight line, the camera follows you well. The moment you need to change direction mid-slice, particularly from horizontal to vertical, the camera and the controls start arguing with each other. You’re holding the slice button while trying to nudge the camera into the new heading while pressing jump and trying to land cleanly, and the result is a fail rate that feels more like fighting the controls than the level. Generous checkpointing keeps the frustration manageable, but it doesn’t make the friction disappear.
I died A LOT across my playthrough, which is not unusual for the genre, but a meaningful chunk of those deaths were the camera’s fault rather than mine (I like to think).
The Boss Fights
Each chapter ends with a colossal machine that needs taking down, and these encounters are the clearest Shadow of the Colossus tribute in the game. You climb, scan for weak points, slice into vulnerable patches, and gradually wear the thing down. They escalate well across the eight chapters, with the later ones introducing environmental puzzling alongside the climb-and-slice loop. Baiting a digger into a trap, spinning up industrial fans to unbalance it, parrying a chainsaw arm at exactly the right beat.
These fights are the showpieces and they mostly land. A couple are over-reliant on the directional motor-slicing I’ve been moaning about, which means the difficulty spike comes more from camera and control friction than from genuine challenge, but the conceptual ambition is genuinely impressive for an indie team this small.
P and Orbie
Between chapters, the game pauses for what it calls Slack Off sections. P leans against a wall, Orbie hovers next to her, and the two have a chat. The dialogue is the divisive bit. Some of it is playfully tender, some of it is genuinely funny, and some of it leans towards a flirty register that’s either charming or eye-rolling depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing.
Personally, I landed on charming. The relationship between P and Orbie carries more weight than I expected, and by the end of the game I was more invested in their dynamic than in the wider mystery of the megastructure. That’s a credit to the writing and Kira Buckland’s delivery, because the rest of the cast is essentially silent.
The frustrating bit is that the story keeps hinting at deeper lore (who built the megastructure, why P is doing this, who the other Slicers are) and then refuses to pay any of it off. There’s an interesting plot point introduced in the final act that I wanted at least another two hours of, and the game just ends. I closed it wanting a sequel rather than feeling satisfied, which is a strange middle ground. Less than fully satisfying, more than a waste of time.
How Long, How Much
Eight chapters, somewhere between ten and fourteen hours depending on how much side content you chase (or how many times you die). There are collectible orb drones scattered through the levels which act as one-hit-protection charms and feed achievements, but no lore reward, which feels like a missed opportunity. Completionists will probably add another two or three hours hunting them.
It’s currently on Game Pass on PC, which is also why it’s been getting more attention than most indie debuts this year. If you have a subscription, you have no excuse not to try it.
Is it worth it?
MOTORSLICE is the kind of indie game I want to recommend even though I can list its faults in detail. The world is stunning. The Motorslice mechanic is one of the most distinct movement systems I’ve used in a while. The boss fights mostly work. P and Orbie deserve a sequel.
The flaws are real but they’re the kind of flaws Regular Studio could iron out in a patch cycle or a follow-up. Camera issues during directional slicing, occasional movement inconsistency, a story that holds too much back. None of those are dealbreakers if you go in knowing they’re there.
If you’re a fan of Shadow of the Colossus, Mirror’s Edge, Nier Automata, or the kind of indie game that aims at something genuinely interesting rather than a safe clone, MOTORSLICE belongs on your list. It’s not a perfect game. It is a memorable one, and in a year stuffed with safe sequels and remakes, memorable counts for a lot.
A confident indie debut held back by camera friction and an under-told story, but the world design, boss fights, and Motorslice mechanic make it one of the most distinctive games of the year.
The post Review: MOTORSLICE | Steam appeared first on Gaming Debugged | Gaming Site Covering Xbox, Indies, News, Features and Gaming Tech.
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