Japanese trains are synonymous with safety, efficiency and reliability. But in Denshattack!, all that goes out the window — or more accurately, off the rails.
Due out July 15 from Spanish indie developer Undercoders, the new game puts players in the engineer’s seat of their own personal wan-man kā (short, one- or two-car trains staffed by a lone driver). You start out as a ramen delivery girl, zipping along the tracks of a near-future Oita Prefecture, part of a Japan ruined by an ambiguous climate catastrophe that has forced its metropolises into sealed domes connected by high-speed rail lines and controlled by a morally dubious megacorporation.
As you journey across the rest of the country, the twisted, obstacle-ridden, boost-filled tracks just happen to be the perfect course for turning your one-car train into a vehicle for grinding, wall-riding and midair-tricking your way across the country. This, the game explains, is “denshattacking” — a portmanteau of “densha” (Japanese for “train”) and “attack,” and the newest extreme sport in this lightly postapocalyptic version of Japan.
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