The beauty of the video game market nowadays is that you'll still find titles that dare to be strange. The concepts remain familiar, but the execution has to be seen and played to be believed. Denshattack! is one such game, where the trailers show one kind of offbeat experience, and playing it gives you something quite different. That's how it felt like when we checked out the demo for Denshattack! before Steam Next Fest.

The story is that due to rapid climate change, the world has transformed. In Japan, domed cities have been built to protect the wealthy from extreme environmental changes, and those places are all connected by a well-maintained train network. Those who aren't lucky enough to live in those domed cities aren't exactly suffering, as they are still able to live off the land fairly well. Players take on the role of a ramen delivery girl who makes her deliveries and travels through what's left of Japan using a train car and a fragmented railway system. After making her latest delivery, she catches the eye of a photographer who was impressed with her driving and casually mentions the sport of Denshattack. Intrigued at the idea that you already possess the basic skills for the sport, you take the photographer as your companion as you travel the country to challenge and beat the best drivers out there.

The only real way to describe Denshattack! is to use other titles to describe the game's major points. The core gameplay feels very much like an endless runner in the vein of something like Temple Run. Your train is always in motion, and while you can brake to avoid some obstacles, you're always encouraged to move forward, since the time to complete the course factors into your final score and medal standing. You can use a horn to destroy some objects in front of you, but you'll also be given opportunities to switch your path. Some are as simple as hitting the direction toward the track next to you, while others are forks in the road that ask you to select a rail direction before moving on. None of the paths act as definitive dead ends.

Mixed into the core mechanic is a drift mechanic that is reminiscent of a heavily modified version of what you'd see in Ridge Racer Type 4. Taking a turn at high speeds may derail your train, but hitting the brake during the turns gives you an unexpected effect. Doing so produced a multicolored meter, and releasing the brake when the meter is green counts as a drift, so you get a slight turbo boost when coming out of the turn. It's a strange mechanic for a train game to have, but it also makes the game relatable, since more people have played arcade-style racing games and kart racers versus train simulators.

Switching tracks and taking on turns is already pretty involved, but then Denshattack! adds maneuvers that are reminiscent of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series. While the demo's featured levels don't show everything, they show plenty of elements that make the train feel like a skateboard. You can preload your jumps to avoid some obstacles that can't be destroyed with your horn, and you can also stop yourself from crashing into airborne objects by slamming the train back on the track. Jumping allows you to pull off tricks that include some variations of spins and airborne twists. Everything is scored, and you get multipliers for good trick combos, so you can't help but feel like this is an unexpected variation of what you'd see in a typical extreme sports game from the early aughts.

The implementation of the trick system, however, feels less like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and more like .skate due to the heavy use of the right analog stick if you're playing with a gamepad. With the shoulder buttons controlling speed and jumps, every trick is mapped to right analog stick movements. Taking a look at the trick glossary, the game uses every curve and direction and double-backing of directions possible to support a large arsenal of tricks. The system also means that transitioning from one trick to another is easier, and the use of the stick also means it's easy for novices to wiggle the stick in any direction and still bust out something that looks cool, even if it means repeating tricks for lower scores.

This all seems like a combination that makes no sense, but it is exemplified in the demo's last featured level, which is a race against one of the boss' minions. While this is set up as a race, there's no actual racing, since you aren't trying to beat your opponent's time, and you don't see the opponent except for at the very beginning. The level comes with loads of turns, branching paths, and ramps to jump from, but there are other set pieces thrown in for good measure. One sequence has you riding through a volcano and eventually dodging fireballs coming your way. Another sequence has you landing on a Ferris wheel and steering around a body of water before you return to the regular tracks. If this is any indication, every level in the full game will resemble a sort of thrill ride, which is exactly how things should be.

Beating the demo actually unlocks one more level, an equivalent of a skate park with a two-minute timer. This is where you get to experience stuff that's not in the demo levels, such as wall riding and rail grinding, the latter of which is very forgiving compared to most extreme sports games. You also have full access to the whole trick arsenal, with plenty of jumps to execute them and no obstacles to worry about. The demo aims for being as iconic as the original PlayStation demo of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in that it had near-infinite replayability, and the level does succeed in making you want to experiment with how crazy your trick combos can get. Whether this demo achieves the same level of notoriety as the classic PlayStation demo remains to be seen.

As for the presentation, the title tries to mimic Jet Set Radio in a number of ways. Graphically, you're looking at a heavily cel-shaded look for the trains, while the environments sport bolder colors but tone down the heavy black line effect. After all these years, the style remains striking. The soundtrack channels the same mood as Sega's classic, and while the style isn't heavy hip-hop, the general vibe is there, so you're still pumped to do some train tricks.

Based on the Steam Next Fest demo, Denshattack! has the potential to be the kind of game that spreads via word of mouth. The merging of so many different game mechanics and ideas works well once you come to grips with it. The presentation is excellent thanks to a sharp cel-shaded look and evocative soundtrack. Most of all, the game has that addictive quality where you just want to replay a stage over and over until you perfect it. Denshattack! is promised to come out in 2026, and we're looking forward to giving the full game a spin when it drops.