How a small Spanish studio turned a silly idea into one of 2026's most distinctive indie pitches — straight from the people who made it.
Denshattack! started, by the developers' own account, with something close to a joke. Studio Director David Jaumandreu has described visiting Japan in the late '90s and being struck by the country's railway system — not just functionally, but aesthetically: the different locomotives, the high-speed trains, the sheer presence of it. That impression sat with the team at Undercoders for years before it turned into anything resembling a game concept.
The actual creative leap — what if trains could grind, jump, and pull off skateboard-style tricks — reportedly began with a literal toy train the team was playing with during development of something else entirely. "What's this stupid thing?" is how one team member has described their own internal reaction to the idea when it first came up, before they fully committed to building an entire game around it.
By the time Denshattack! was formally announced at Gamescom 2025, the team had already been working on it for roughly two years — and the very first prototype reportedly traces back even further, closer to three years before that announcement. That's a genuinely long, quiet development cycle for a project built around such an immediately legible, almost goofy pitch.
The team built the game in Unreal Engine 5 — a choice that might seem unexpected for a stylized, cel-shaded game, since UE5 is often associated with photorealistic graphics. According to the developers, the engine's shader system and particle effects were specifically what let them achieve the bold, saturated visual style Denshattack! is known for, citing other UE5 titles known for non-realistic art direction — Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, and Borderlands — as proof the engine handles stylized work well, not just realism.
Across nearly every developer interview and press preview, the same handful of reference points keep coming up — both from the team describing their own inspirations and from critics independently arriving at the same comparisons.
The team has also spoken about wanting Denshattack!'s protagonist Emi to function as a stand-in for the player themselves — someone defined by curiosity and a willingness to chase whatever opportunity comes by, rather than a fixed, heavily-written personality imposed on the player.
The soundtrack carries real industry pedigree too: lead composer Tee Lopes is best known for his work on Sonic Mania, Sonic Frontiers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, with additional contributions from the video game music label Kid Katana. The full game also ships with a complete English and Japanese voice-acted story.