Denshattack devs on counterculture, biker gangs, and fighting mechas with trains

Denshattack, the upcoming train-driving game from Undercoders, turns out to be a lot more politically charged than its goofy premise suggests — and game director David Jaumandreu says that wasn't even a deliberate choice.

The game's main antagonists are a rogue big tech corporation wielding a familiar arsenal of modern social ills: enforced inequality, mass surveillance, AI replacing skilled workers, misinformation, and police violence. You fight back by assembling a crew drawn from Japanese counterculture — biker gangs and other normbreaker groups — and repeatedly ramming your locomotive through oppressive machinery at full Shinkansen speed. Jaumandreu says the political edge wasn't consciously engineered; it emerged naturally from building a version of Japan that's even more obsessed with trains than the real one.

Denshattack draws comparisons to skateboarding games more than anything else in the train genre — if a train genre can even be said to exist. Like the best skate games, it carries a countercultural undercurrent that stops it from feeling like pure ironic novelty. The targets it picks are specifically 2026-shaped, which gives the comedy a sharper edge than the cheerful, locomotive-smashing surface implies.

The result is a game that can stretch a daft grin across your face while also meaning something — a balance that's harder to pull off than it looks, and one Undercoders seems to have landed without overthinking it.