I’ve been following MOTORSLICE on social media for a few months now. Proudly inspired by the Prince of Persia and Mirror’s Edge series, it fills a platforming niche that’s different from the mascot platformers I usually enjoy.

With its creative aesthetic, cute protagonist, and ambitious design I was curious to try out the demo. What I found was a challenging adventure that will no doubt be much grander in scope with the full release.

In MOTORSLICE you take control of P, a young woman who enters a strange facility on what should have been a simple job. However as the facility ends up being much much larger than anticipated, P begins to think there’s something more at stake here.

Accompanying her is a “malfunctioning” orb drone she calls Orbie, which is technically the player avatar (or at least that’s how I inferred it). Orbie offers insights and gives P someone to talk to, which helps make the game’s storytelling and exposition seem more natural than just P muttering to herself.

The aesthetic is what really drew me into MOTORSLICE, the presence of the machinery and the wide empty spaces reminded me a lot of Girls’ Last Tour (or NieR: Automata), it’s punky but also haunting and lonely. It’s like a world that humanity abandoned and all that remains is dust and the machines we left behind.

Speaking of machines, MOTORSLICE has an unforgiving combat system. P is incredibly athletic and can parkour like nobody’s business, but she’s also not made out of tungsten carbide. Which means if an autonomous excavator decides to scoop her in half, you only got one shot. P dies in a single hit, meaning players will need to learn the way enemies telegraph their moves and also understand their aggro ranges to avoid being quickly overrun.

Bossfights appear to offer much more depth and opportunities to show off what you’ve learned over the course of playing. Which brings me to how I feel about the game’s parkour. MOTORSLICE doesn’t play like a traditional platformer, instead the game feels more like a “parkour” simulator where you’re given tools and specific inputs.

It’s weird to describe it, but imagine how in Super Mario 64 you have momentum and speed which affects everything from how you maneuver in the air to how you interact with walls and terrain. Meanwhile, MOTORSLICE feels more like Jet Set Radio. It’s less about momentum and hitting certain angles, but more about the mechanical skill of hitting the right inputs when interacting with terrain.

As a result, MOTORSLICE is both precise but also unforgiving. It’s very easy to mess up and accidentally be holding the wrong direction so instead of running across a wall to start a series of walljumps, you instead run up the wall and have no real way to recover. It sucks, but I get it.

Thankfully MOTORSLICE is forgiving with the amount of checkpoints in the game. If you prefer your platformers challenging and your aesthetics less cartoony than mascot platformers, MOTORSLICE is worth checking out on Steam.