Every summer sneaks up a surprise critical darling, and 2026's is a platformer about a rebellious train. Denshattack! launched July 15 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2 — and it's currently sitting around 88 on Metacritic, one of the best-reviewed releases of the entire month and comfortably the season's indie-envy story.
The premise sells itself in a frame: you are a cute-analog locomotive grinding, flipping and drifting your way through a neon-stroked Japan's entire railway network, chaining ollies and tricks through stations, overpasses and freight yards. The flow lands somewhere between Jet Set Radio's pop-aggression and OlliOlli's technical purity — momentum as meditation, comboing across the Tokaido line at physics-defying speed.
Part of what's captivated critics is the same thing that made Tony Hawk's lineage evergreen: it takes mastery arriving to fully click, but it flatters you at absolutely every stage along the way. The other part is the audacity of inspiration. A grind rail platformer shouldn't sustain as melodic song-and-level design as this does, nor support this much visual identity — and yet.
Importantly for raw reach, it's also day one on Xbox Game Pass, which is the single fastest way to put an oddball virtuoso indie in front of several million players with zero friction. Developers deserve this level of landing pad every time they swing this hard, and it's paying back across review pages.
The summer of 2026 has been dominated by sequels. The most original game of the season is a train with attitude. All aboard. Sorry.