In hindsight, I was a fool for meeting Denshattack’s satirical, irreverent, downright countercultural sensibilities with surprise. Upbeat, even goofy as it is for a train driving game, it shares more common ground with skateboarding games, and while the commodification of skater culture is certainly A Thing, few skaters have ever reapplied their asphalt-eating skills to bootlicking.
What remains striking, though, is how specifically '2026' Denshattack's targets are. The main baddies are a rogue big tech company, deploying all your current favourite social ills: enforced inequality, mass surveillance, misinformation-spewing talking heads, police violence, and soulless AI replacing true craft and skill. If only it did a bit on mass layoffs, it would have had a full set. You meet them with force, too, assembling a crew that resembles a Greatest Hits of Japanese normbreaker groups while repeatedly ramming your engine through those oppressive mechanisms at top-gear Skinkansen speeds.
The result is that Denshattack manages to have it both ways, being fully capable of stretching a daft grin across your face, yet possessing a radical heart that wards off the sense – and, indeed, accusations – that this is just an ironic bit of comedy train capering. Yet according to David Jaumandreu, game director at developers Undercoders, Denshattack was never consciously given a political voice – it simply emerged, logically and naturally, from its Japan being shaped as a more locomotive-mad version of the real one.
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