Ordinarily, I might make a pun about how I’m going through the “motions” of writing another review, if I weren’t so pleased with my subject today. What we’ve got here is MotionRec, a delightful puzzle game from developer Handsum (not sure if that’s a pun) and publisher Playism. In MotionRec, you play as Rec, a small robot who needs to navigate several chapters’ worth of puzzles by making precise movements ahead of time. By “ahead of time,” I mean you have a cassette tape (ask your parents) that can record sets of your movements and then play them back on demand.

I’d recommend you play MotionRec with a gamepad of some kind if you can. Gamepad controls have certainly made MotionRec’s core gameplay loop easier for me. I haven’t tried any other control schemes, so I’ll proceed through the rest of the review discussing gamepad controls. Once you acquire that cassette tape, you hold the left trigger to start recording your movements. You keep recording until you either die, release the left trigger, or you make the maximum number of movements the tape can record. You then hold the right trigger to repeat the moves you just recorded, no matter where you are.

The ability to play back your recorded actions is crucial for navigating puzzles and avoiding hazards. Once you’ve recorded a set of movements, you’ll see a green dotted line on your screen that shows the exact path you took in your most recent recording. That line ends in a green square indicating where you’ll end up if you play back that full sequence from your current position, assuming there are no impassable walls or objects between you and that point. You have no finite lives or other pressure to worry about, so trial and error works quite well in MotionRec.

I think my favorite aspect of MotionRec’s core gameplay loop is that, instead of railroading you or holding your hand too much with any sort of overbearing tutorial, MotionRec simply ensures you have everything you need to get past the current puzzle and gives you all the time and attempts you need to figure out each puzzle’s solution. I usually struggle with puzzle games so much that I quickly become frustrated and give up, but that didn’t happen once during my time with MotionRec. MotionRec absolutely nails that addictive sense of catharsis puzzle games provide when you find their solutions.

Another major point in MotionRec’s favor is how generous it is with checkpoints. There’s a checkpoint at the start of each puzzle, as well as an option to instantly return to the last checkpoint you reached. The only potential catch (if you can call it that) is that every time you touch a new checkpoint, you lose the most recent sequence of movements you recorded. More often than not, however, I actually find that really helpful since the potential solutions between any number of consecutive puzzles are very likely to be entirely different from one another, as you might expect.

If you enjoy laid-back puzzle games and you’re anywhere near as much of a sucker for the rush of dopamine puzzle games provide when you figure out their secrets, I can gladly recommend MotionRec. The only caveat to that is if you either don’t have a gamepad or have accessibility issues that make using gamepads difficult for you. Thankfully, however, if you buy MotionRec, you’ll likely find out whether or not its gameplay will give you trouble (and, if so, to what extent) well before the two-hour mark at which Steam will no longer allow you to refund MotionRec automatically.

A PC review key for MotionRec was provided by Playism for the purposes of this review.

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MotionRec

$9.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Highly engaging core gameplay loop.
• Minimalist graphics still convey quite a lot of detail.
• Gameplay lets the player figure out puzzle solutions at their own pace.

Cons

• Control schemes could be potential accessibility concerns.