'MotorSlice' is among the biggest surprises of 2026, especially during such a packed couple of months in indie gaming.
Regular Studio
MotorSlice somehow passed me by until last month, but after watching the trailer, I just had to play it. After an exhaustive 14-hour run, I still can’t stop thinking about it, even though it spent a lot of time annoying, frustrating, and angering me along the way.
Still, no regrets. MotorSlice isn’t perfect, but it’s an incredibly ambitious game that aims to live up to its obvious, genre-defining influences like Shadow of the Colossus, Mirror’s Edge, and Horizon Zero Dawn. It’s no mean feat, given it’s from Regular Studio, a small Brazilian indie outfit headed up by brothers Luqui and Saiki.
MotorSlice puts you in the jumpsuit of chainsaw girl Slicer P, partnered with their handler Operator G, who’s housed in a floating orb. You land on a barren, stunning, and apparently post-human planet to destroy vehicular Elden Machines — think HZD, if Caterpillar had a product placement deal — but the orb breaks, severing your connection to G.
You fix the orb, and the game reveals its defining twist: you’re not just controlling P, but you’re also the (now G-less) camera drone, orbiting her as she moves. It gives the whole experience a different feel, simultaneously bringing you closer to and distancing you from P.
From here, the game positions itself as a parkour-inspired platformer that feels like a hybrid of Mirror’s Edge and Colossus. Across eight chapters, the game escalates from simple running, jumping, climbing, and exploration to include interactive platforms, windmills, mines, and ever more complex enemies. Motorslicing is the core ability, where P plunges her chainsaw into golden, electrified walls to navigate areas or destroy enemies.
When the game flows seamlessly — which is, mercifully, most of the time thanks to its solid framerate and simple, colorful and beautiful art style — MotorSlice feels fantastic, and constantly matches your growing confidence with stages and sections that demand more deliberate maneuvers and quick adaptation. However, it has a habit of interrupting itself.
The biggest culprit is “you”, the camera. While the drone perspective is clever, it frequently struggles to keep up with the action. Tight platforming sequences with twists and turns mean you have to trial-and-error-and-fudge your way around things, if only to learn your next move or destination. In more complex sections, specifically those requiring you to change from horizontal to vertical motorslicing, you have to manually adjust the camera mid-action — sometimes uncomfortably, given all the other buttons you’re pressing — and hope for the best.
Motorslicing is great... most of the time.
Regular Studio
Movement can be similarly inconsistent. Jumps have an odd, floaty tail; wall-running can lock you into unintended paths; a couple of mechanics, like pole climbing, are poorly introduced. Rolling, attacking, and parrying can carry too much forward momentum, pushing you into danger or to a very brutal death on narrow platforms. Luckily, these are quirks you quickly learn to mitigate, as they’re just par for the course.
Combat is, admittedly, pretty straightforward, and difficult sections tend to be due to bad timing during parrying. Boss fights take the experience to a whole new level, bringing back memories of Shadow of the Colossus’s high-concept puzzles. Sadly, a couple of the best ideas are also the hardest to defeat, due to their reliance on directional motorslicing.
Boss battles are as cinematic as they come.
Regular Studio
Despite boss battles being the showpiece of MotorSlice, the strongest impression it left on me was its death sequences. It’ll happen a lot; I died over 260 times on my run. These failures are visceral and mercifully quick; you collapse into a bloody heap if you don’t roll out of higher drops, get mulched by machinery, find yourself sliced in half by floating baddies, or get crushed by falling debris.
MotorSlice saves its best and most heart-wrenching moments for those long, drawn-out falls, where you trip off a platform and fall hundreds of feet, reaching terminal velocity as the camera warps and your breath quickens, knowing your fate: briefly watching your head descend through your stomach, and your limbs cartoonishly detaching in a ball of blood.
Dying is inevitable, frequent, and unforgettable.
Regular Studio
After each cut to black, the camera quickly moves back to your last location, and P gasps in shock at the horror she’s just been through and, presumably, the surprise of being reborn. Still, the repetition of dying eventually wears thin, but you can hold Select to restart instead of suffering through every death plunge, which can last five or more seconds.
Sometimes, if you’re lost, you might actively kill yourself to get teleported onto the right track. Occasionally, MotorSlice does you a solid by putting you at the end of the section you’ve just failed, though the half-dozen times this happened to me, I still felt a little robbed of satisfaction. It’s an easy enough fix.
Those looking for a deep storyline won’t really get one with MotorSlice. Personally, I didn’t really mind, at least until the final act of the game, when something is introduced that feels like it could’ve been an excellent, underpinning plot point.
Instead, narrative progression comes mainly through “slack off” sections, which are brief, slower interactions that explore P’s relationship with O.R.B.I.E. Voice actor Kira Buckland is in her absolute element, especially as she’s the only voice in the game after the first 60 seconds. Conversations range from playful and oddly intimate to outright thirsty, as O.R.B.I.E.’s only two options to P’s questions or thoughts are either “do your job” or “do me”.
Keep it in your pants, O.R.B.I.E.
Regular Studio
Optional challenges to collect other orbs add an extra challenge for completionists, but there’s no real story reason or incentive to do it, other than to 100% the game and tick off a couple of achievements. These side quests can also come at the occasional expense of knowing where the hell you need to go — double-checking your orb detector usually highlights (or, rather, lowlights) the story player’s direction of travel, but you’re never 100% sure, as you potentially waste five or ten minutes on a frustrating return journey.
There’s no doubt that MotorSlice is easy to like and even more difficult to put down. It evolves, little by little, with new enemies, puzzles, and quick-response mechanics, giving you constant pangs of satisfaction as you improve. But then, rather suddenly, it’s over, leaving you wanting more.
I cleared MotorSlice in around 12 hours (eight, according to the final in-game clock), and spent a couple more getting the final achievements, which I felt I needed to do — it was a real compulsion I haven’t had with a game in a few months. It’s a testament to Regular Studio’s vision that you’ll want to get every last drop out of it, even if its exhilarating high points are occasionally undermined at critical moments.
Even as you learn its quirks, you never fully feel that you’re in control, and probably won’t until some mechanics are ironed out in post. But you’ll push through its rough edges, because I’d wager that MotorSlice will be among 2026’s most memorable and loved indie games.
Hopefully, a sequel will finally answer the many questions that are left hanging in the air, or simply ask them in the first place. Given how well this debut turned out, I’d bet good money on a MotorSlice follow-up.
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