The Steam Featured Win spotlight doesn’t guarantee a hit. MOTORSLICE just made it look automatic.

Developed by Regular Studio — a two-brother team named Lucas and Luiz — and published by Top Hat Studios, MOTORSLICE crashed into Steam’s #7 Top Sellers slot within 24 hours of its May 5 launch, pulling 1,211 concurrent players and a Very Positive rating: 93% across 251 reviews. For a retro-styled indie action game at $17.99, those are statement numbers.

The hook is aesthetic. Players are zeroing in on the PS1-era platforming and level design — one reviewer with 14.6 hours logged called out the “great mascot like main character brimming with personality” and compared enemies to classic Crash Bandicoot. Another review, barely a handful of words and 2.2 hours deep, simply reads: “Th-thank you… Chainsaw Woman…” That one has energy you can’t manufacture.

And Chainsaw Woman — officially named P — is doing the heavy lifting. She’s a “Slicer” dropped into a brutalist megastructure, armed with a chainsaw and partnered with a malfunctioning drone called Orb, tasked with dismantling colossal rogue construction machines. The gameplay sits at the intersection of Shadow of the Colossus’s boss-climbing scale and Nier: Automata’s quiet character moments, wrapped in pixelated low-poly visuals running on Unreal Engine 5. Yahoo Tech’s review called it “one of the year’s most surprising games to date,” praising movement mechanics reminiscent of 2008’s Prince of Persia.

The question is legs. A Featured Win slot is a sugar rush. But the ingredients for staying power are there: Kira Buckland’s voice work as P, a DnB/Jungle OST by Pizza Hotline, multiplatform availability including Xbox Game Pass, and a mascot character who’s already becoming a meme. At $17.99 with a 10% launch discount, the barrier to entry is low enough that word of mouth could carry this well past the spotlight.

Steam’s curation team picked a winner. Now it’s on Regular Studio to prove the legs are real.

Sources