While not quite as rife with grumpy grey soulslikes as June’s Summer Game Fest, Gamescom 2025 primarily favoured moodiness over levity. Silent Hill f? Hardly out to make jokes. Dawn of War 4? Pretty grim and a little dark, if you ask me. Hollow Knight: Silksong? They don’t have mouths to smile with.
But then, we also got Denshattack. Now there’s a big, daft bundle of laughs, a half-racing, half-score attack trickster that both rattled and rejuvenated my expo-ravaged bones upon playing its demo in the Gamescom Indie Arena. All while centring around what has, traditionally, been the dullest of wheely vehicles: the train.
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Denshattack (sorry, I can’t bring myself to type the exclamation mark) gleefully, almost derangedly subverts the anorakish air of the passenger locomotive by effectively making it an enormous skateboard. You’re still following rails (for the most part), but they almost always lead to vast, chasm-leaping jumps, wallridable billboards, and axle-grinding pipe networks. You can boing off and between rails at will, either to perform THPS-esque carriage flip combos, or to avoid an escalating series of track obstructions: falling rocks, fireballs, mecha attacks, and all the other perils that Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have faced if he were a shonen manga protagonist.
It’s all profoundly silly, and yet Denshattack never feels like a disposable, “Haha train go upside down” gag in itself. It’s clear that a lot of care and craft has gone into making your joyrides feel fast, from the just-right intensity of the camera shake to a soundtrack that surely ground the wrist bones of four different session drummers to dust. Braking is necessary on tight corners, but even this is treated as an opportunity to carry that sense of momentum: time it right and you’ll pull off a railbound powerslide that ends in a powerful boost.
The spectacle doesn’t end at sick flips, either. My demo’s crescendo sequence began with commandeering a ferris wheel to unicycle the train across a trackless beach, and ended with a desperate scramble through the core of an erupting volcano, jumping between tracks to avoid the magma blasts. And, judging from the trailer, these could easily end up being two of the final game’s less fantastical action moments. What makes them so joyous, mind, isn’t just the visual drama but the fact that you’re right in there, part of and sometimes directly causing the chaos. It all plays in nicely with that sensation of mad, physics-breaking speed, as if you’re tearing around so quickly that reality starts breaking down around you.
My only concern, at this point, is how well I’ll cope with Denshattack’s sensory overload beyond a 15 minute demo. It is bloody good fun but my word, do you need to concentrate: hazards bear down on you in a blink and even a single botched corner will send you careening off the track, so you do need to be aware and prepared to jump, dodge, and brake at the right times. All in addition to, and ideally combined with, busting out the twisty, point-scoring tricks. It’s a lot, for sure.
I hope I’m up to the challenge, though, as this was probably my favourite Gamescom game of the whole show – and definitely the one that elicited the biggest grin. It’s out in 2026.
Check out our Gamescom 2025 event hub for all the PC game announcements and preview coverage from Cologne.