The idea arrived by accident, while a man in Barcelona fiddled with a toy train. David Jaumandreu runs Undercoders, a small Spanish studio that had spent years making pleasant, sensible platformers, and what came off that toy train was a game in which Japanese commuter trains grind rails, ride up walls and, when the mood takes them, do kickflips. That game is 'Denshattack!'. It launched on Wednesday for $20 and reached the Switch 2 eShop a day later, and the reviews now piling up are the kind most $200 million productions would trade a sequel for. One critic on the Metacritic pile calls it 'one of the most purely enjoyable games of the year'. Another has it down as a Game of the Year contender. It is a train. Doing kickflips.
Undercoders pitched this game for more than a year and collected nos in every register publishing has to offer, from the polite pass to the enthusiastic pass. Jaumandreu has admitted the team feared players would find the whole thing 'stupid', a worry they could have spared themselves, since the publishers got there first. Internally they wondered, in his words, if they 'should just ditch the idea and try something more conventional'. Spare a thought for those pitch meetings: a year of professionals paid to recognise hits, each explaining in turn why the kickflipping train wasn't one.
The public settled it in about ninety seconds. When the game was revealed at Gamescom's opening night in Cologne last summer, the team stood on the show floor braced for laughter and got the good kind instead. London's Fireshine Games signed it. Nintendo let it onto Switch 2 as a console exclusive, the studio having skipped the old Switch because the hardware couldn't hold the speed. It launched day one on Game Pass, a service having an otherwise complicated summer. The year's most joyful games story runs from a toy train in Barcelona through a stage in Cologne to a publisher in London, and nobody along the route asked permission from the people who'd spent a year refusing it.
In the game, Japan's cities sit under corporate domes, an idea borrowed with a shrug from 'The Simpsons Movie', and a noodle chef named Emi fights the Miraidō Corporation the only way available to her, which is doing tricks with rolling stock across sixty-plus stages of the national rail map. The whole thing is a fever dream with a work ethic. It runs on 'Jet Set Radio' attitude and 'Tony Hawk' trick grammar, and the best name on the influence list is 'Densha de Go!', Japan's beloved train-driving series in which the entire point is stopping smoothly and on time. Japan spent thirty years making games that grade your punctuality. It took a studio in Barcelona to make the train misbehave.
A publisher's whole apparatus is built to say yes to things that resemble things that already sold, which is a sensible way to avoid losing money and a guaranteed way to never sign the game people describe to each other at lunch. 'Tony Hawk, but the skateboard is a train' takes five seconds and survives any retelling. That sentence is worth more than a marketing campaign, and it is the same sentence that kept getting the game rejected, because in a pitch meeting it sounds like a joke and in a group chat it sounds like a purchase.
Undercoders got the last word. The game hands a smaller one to my profession: Emi's sidekick is Fernando, a budding journalist, and the collectibles you earn by doing train tricks fund his fanzines. Somewhere under that dome sits a freelance reporter whose entire revenue model is a noodle chef kickflipping a commuter train past his window. I have pitched to worse.
