Indie dev discovers nuclear fusion of Steam marketing, flies up wishlist charts thanks to bashful anime girl with freckles who parries machine giants with a chainsaw

A few years ago, developer Regular Studio was exclusively known as the creator of Togges, a 3D puzzle-platformer that received 169 "mixed" user reviews on Steam. Regular Studio is now much better known as the maker of Motorslice, a promising 3D platformer channeling Mirror's Edge and Shadow of the Colossus, which is due out May 5 on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. But I suspect Motorslice is known to many players as that parkour game with the cute anime girl in it.

According to SteamDB, Motorslice is the 150th most-wishlisted game on Steam. That's not an extraordinarily high ranking, but in the grand scheme of Steam, and for the second game from a very small (seemingly one-person) developer, that's also a pretty damn good number. For context, Motorslice is within spitting distance of My Time at Evershine, the latest in a long and hugely popular franchise of life sim RPGs. Innumerable indies would kill to have this many wishlists, and I have a theory on where some of them came from.

Last year, the Regular Studio YouTube channel uploaded a few broad looks at Motorslice. "4K gameplay," promised one, racking up 65,000 views. "I'm making a brutalist Prince of Persia," said another with 37,000 views. I was intrigued; this video is what led me to try its Steam Next Fest demo, which ultimately impressed me.

On March 7, 2025, the tides of history changed forever. "She likes to touch things," proclaims a short, in-progress look at wandering main character P, a turquoise-haired, heavily freckled, chainsaw-wielding, low-poly anime girl with a bashful personality (who is voiced by Kira Buckland, a prolific actor in games and anime). This video has 511,000 views. Regular Studio seems to have noticed this spike, because it went all-in on showcasing P in every way possible in every single video after this point.

I made a *very* touchable main menu - YouTube

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P parrying a dump truck the size of a skyscraper. P showing off the thermoses on her belt. P in the built-in selfie mode dutifully ignoring bloodthirsty machines in the background. And then there's Regular Studio's magnum opus, with 3.5 million views, "I made a *very* touchable main menu," showing off the way P swats at the cursor from Motorslice's main menu if you click her face and hair. She also waves at you when you quit the game, which is a really nice touch.

I still think of Motorslice as a parkour action game, but it's officially described on Steam as a "slice of life action-adventure with immaculate vibes," and Regular Studio is really leaning into that slice of life. The chunky aesthetic, towering mechs, and brutalist environments of Motorslice hooked me from the jump, but judging from the state of the game's YouTube comments and Steam discussion, P herself also has a non-trivial following. It's all just marketing soup at the end of the day, but the weapons-grade effectiveness of "anime girl blushes at you" continues to impress.

I've been covering games for years and I think this is the first time I've seen a developer add an "Embarrassing" section to patch notes to call themselves out.