Motorslice ★★★☆☆

This game picks a few things to do and does most of them very well. Your goal, as a “slicer” called P, is to climb to the top of a brutalist megastructure in and endless desert that is being continuously built and rebuilt by autonomous machines and tear apart everything that moves inside it with a chainsaw. The relatively low-poly, pixelated art suits the environment and enemies really well and as you jump, swing, parkour and propel yourself up the tower by digging your chainsaw into exposed machinery and letting it carry you. Combat is basic, but satisfying and a good change of pace from platforming, and colossal machine bosses offer an industrial Shadow of the Colossus that you tear up even as you scale them. The entire thing is one huge map and it is very satisfying to look down and see previous areas and bosses you’ve left behind as you ascend.

It can be frustrating, though. The game is very unforgiving of mistakes and most things that can kill you do so in one hit. It’s also all too easy to accidentally lightly brush against a wall as you land somewhere, triggering a wall run that will propel P to her death. Having to hold one of the shoulder buttons to parkour, or perhaps some kind of toggle, would have saved a lot of grief. Whether you climb up for fly along the side of a wall is also determined by the direction P’s body is facing, rather than the direction the player is holding, and it can be very easy to misjudge depending on the camera angle or to think you have sufficiently re-aligned, only to find yourself plummeting into the void again.

Like Super Mario 64 the camera has a physical presence in the world and is in a way the “real” player character. P’s drone, that she calls Orbie, follows her everywhere she goes and acts as the camera. Orbie’s physical presence in the world is used in a few interesting ways the game even has a dedicated blink button like in Alone in the Dark 2008 to clear dust off the camera lens. Orbie also desperately wants to fuck P. What story there is is told through short intermission conversations where P will sometimes drop some exposition and the player is offered two responses for Orbie, which generally boil down to some variation of “shut up and get back to work” and “please let me sniff your feet.” Whatever you respond with she barely ever reacts to it in any way that matters and she says at one point that she can only understand small bits of what Orbie says anyway. These intermissions might be an interesting insight into the world and characters if P had any personality or the player had any meaningful way of interacting with her other than sexual harassment. The leeriness doesn’t end there either; this is the only game I’ve played where the photo mode has a built in ahegao pose.

A more refined version of this that actually had an interest in its protagonist outside of objectification and more fleshed out bosses would be great.