The Indie Informer

If I told you to envision a “train game,” what comes to mind? Maybe you’d think of a management sim where you expand a locomotive empire across the world, or perhaps that Thomas the Tank Engine–inspired horror game is top of mind. No matter how long your list of ideas is, though, something tells me that a “frenetic, skateboarding-adjacent arcade racer with Persona stylings” would land somewhere near the bottom—and that’s exactly what makes Denshattack! so special.

Denshattack! is a game so conceptually bizarre that the more you think about it, the more it loops around to feeling like a normal and obvious progression of the ideation process. It takes a novel approach to the combo-chaining, score-attack genre by building everything around a train barreling down elaborate railroad routes.

From there, it layers on a modern soundtrack and anime-inspired visuals. It gives the game a unique, contemporary style that sets it apart from anything else you’ve played within this loosely adjacent genre. And just in case the premise alone wasn’t interesting enough, each level introduces escalating stakes through dynamic track evolutions and scripted gameplay events that aren’t afraid to throw logic to the wind in service of delivering something totally unexpected and exciting.

So…yeah. An obvious progression when you think about it that way.

I recently played the Steam Next Fest demo for Denshattack! and came away pleasantly surprised. For context, I’m a very casual fan of arcade-like, combo-focused games. I’m not the type to commit dozens of tricks to memory in hopes of being the most precise or flashy player; instead, I’m usually more concerned with riding the vibe and experimenting with whatever freedom the game allows while still prioritizing the main objective. From what I’ve played so far, Denshattack! seems well-positioned to satisfy both approaches, offering a handcrafted, linear experience for casual players while leaving a high skill ceiling intact for those who want to chase perfection.

When you start, you’re greeted by stylized menus and an (incredibly catchy) jazz-influenced pop soundtrack—a tone that harkens back to the old-school Dreamcast era, when games were focused on making every session feel iconic. More modern audiences might even detect hints of Persona 5, another game that puts a high level of thought into its fusion of modern visuals and music.

Diving into story mode, I was happy to discover a wacky narrative supported by fully voiced dialogue. The campaign revolves around Emi, a skilled train operator who gets recruited as a Denshattacker, which essentially boils down to someone who uses a train in the same way a skater uses their board in the X-Games. From what I can tell, the narrative is less concerned with hard-hitting emotional plotlines and more interested in setting up incredibly bizarre story beats that double as genuinely fun gameplay scenarios—and, to be clear, that’s a good thing.

In the span of five minutes, I went from balancing atop a giant rampaging Ferris wheel to chasing down a rival train racer inside an active volcano on the brink of eruption. Denshattack! very clearly knows what it wants to be and is leaning all the way into that identity. The over-the-top, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure–level foolishness of the whole experience is honestly something I’ve missed in gaming, and I’m incredibly excited to see just how far the developers are willing to push things in the full release.

Mechanically, Denshattack! is also deceptively deep. Like most games in this space, you’re given a trick dictionary—a trickionary—filled with train acrobatics of varying difficulties to chain together. Despite being confined to rails, the game finds plenty of creative ways to expand its move set. In addition to popping into the air to perform a wide variety of tricks, you can grind along tracks, manual, grind across multiple rails at once, and pull off a whole host of other maneuvers that are likely well outside my personal skill range. The result is a playground that will almost certainly produce countless trick videos and montages showcasing things I didn’t even realize were possible.

The creators of Denshattack! clearly had a strong vision and executed on it. The game feels unlike anything else currently releasing alongside it, harkening back to a style of design that I’ve sorely missed. At the time of writing, I’ve played through the demo six times (it’s relatively short), and I’m already itching for more. If the full game can maintain the same energy and creativity as the demo, there’s a strong chance that players drawn to completely different aspects of the experience will all find something to love.