It’s difficult to put into words my feelings about Beast of Reincarnation. This feels fair given my muddled frame of thought following such a muddled game. When the game begins, it introduces Emma, the main character, to you in the worst possible way. A flash-forward to some serious action, before returning to the start of the story, then juxtaposing all of that with a flashback is too much. It feels relatively pointless given the fact that we are five minutes in and already suffering from tonal inconsistency.
Somewhere in this, they give what I guess would count as a story. The Beast of Reincarnation is this monster that has revived. That’s mostly the long and short of it. You play as an outsider, a Sealer, who was touched by blight, which gives her these vines and flowers on her. It also makes her somebody who is talked down to by our robot overlords, something that will make you more upset when you realize how easy it is to slash them apart. Giving me that attitude to go handle your problems.
All of those robot overlords die like 10 seconds later, telling you to go kill the beast before a monster charges in and absolutely wrecks everybody’s day. From here, the game is a road trip adventure where the main party, a motley crew of survivors, travel from stage to stage hunting down monsters that honestly reminded me way more of Wild Hearts than anything else. Even most attacks have some plant of flower power behind them, which is just insanely in line with that game.
People who know me know that I love road trip games. They might be among my favorites; it’s such an easy way to get me invested. And instead of a car, the main cast has a bipedal walking mech house. You son of a, I’m in. And that’s the thing: on paper, I was already aware this was for me. I just found myself far too soon into it uninvested in the story.
This might have something to do with the fact that literally all the characters are insanely boring. What hurts this game was I stomached Stellar Blade the full way through before admitting Eve was a boring protagonist. I genuinely can’t extend the same grace to Emma. But the thing is, Emma has an excuse; her character is established to be lacking emotion; that’s part of her arc. I am starting to get frustrated with all action females having some sort of robotic nature, but I digress. Every other character has the same blandness in conversation. This soft-spoken nature that, while peaceful, just isn’t engaging. Koo, the wolf that joins and fights with you, was the only character that really resonated with me… And he doesn’t talk.
This is hurt by most cutscenes playing out with characters standing there and having slow dialogue. They aren’t even talking about anything, like you follow it, and these have some character development there, but your eyes glaze over halfway into them, always and forever. Action cutscenes are also incredibly bland with stiff animations. This is way more noticeable because mid-fight animations, like when you land a killing blow, are actually superb, so you wonder why you have characters square off in a narrative moment only for it to look that way.
Thankfully, the music that accompanies every one of these moments is beautiful, and I would stack this soundtrack against others very positively. Logistically, it is very similar to that of NieR: Automata with gentle, haunting vocals and gorgeous orchestras. It perfectly accompanies the exploration, which is set across long-forgotten grasslands that are all consumed by robots and gigantic murder creatures. There are the collapsing ruins of society being retaken by nature, which evokes a similar feeling to Horizon: Zero Dawn; however, they missed a great opportunity. Early on, Emma is living in a hut that has some obvious inspiration from feudal Japan, but the game quickly abandons the motif, and I would have loved to see the society reset aspect with Japanese imagery.
The level design is fairly solid as well. While the game is to some degree level-based with multiple stages that you will travel through, there are also open-ended. It’s pretty easy to take a strong left turn, walk an entire path leading away from the waypoint, and end up in an open area with enemies to fight and more to look around and see. Emma also has a pretty cool traversal ability in her lift, which allows her to get pushed up high by vines rather than a double jump. This makes finding secrets interesting, as some points literally look like your traditional blocked wall-to-bar traversal, only for you to jump over it and find an item.
More often than not, the main objectives will take you to every point; you just have the right to get lost before that. Equally, progression does feel unique through the stages. The simple loop is to walk pathways, fight enemies, die a lot, and keep doing it. There is a soulslike nature to this, but it’s slightly more forgiving until you reach enemies that just wreck your health. You will also find yourself chasing the big bad through multiple points, having a few fights against them as you go. Okay, there is a lot of repetition. The in-between this, though, feels enjoyably different as the levels evolve. Some very vertical stages, one where you navigate a temple.
Despite levels being open, the side content can be painfully bland. There is backtracking, which is good, because it is surprisingly easy to miss valuable tools that play into combat. There is also a perplexing item system that can overwhelm, as the brunt of exploration is grabbing what isn’t bolted down. The side content, though, is light and mostly involves finding some minor locations and maybe heading in that direction to get the more valuable items. The in-game map is horrendous to navigate, which is where all these notable things are tracked, so that makes trying to track down these things an absolute pain. Related but also not, I found it annoying that so many big buildings with many floors have invisible walls, making the literal openings unusable.
The game has a legitimate leveling system with experience gained for killing every enemy you can. This is how you will spend most of the game anyway, and I do love the combat in this game. I don’t think you are supposed to develop the Souls mindset of respawning and then fighting every enemy again in the same path until I finally beat that one guy who killed me. But that’s what I did. The combat itself is fast-paced, arguably even more so than its action contemporaries, with combat really revolving around multiple enemies that can all attack in quick flurries.
The heart of this system is a parry system with a fairly forgiving window. Some mastery is required if you want to start doing well, but landing these feeds into a stagger system that allows you to insta-kill almost every enemy in the game, save for a few. In fairness, you often can just play on the back foot and ultimately get the same results. Swordplay is a satisfyingly fast combo-nailing affair, though, so not stabbing everything would be doing a disservice to yourself.
Every single aspect of combat runs through the parry system too. The player has a gauge they can fill that allows for time to slow that is largely filled by perfect parries. A standard parry eats into this to maintain your block. Similarly, every perfect parry you can land charges up the gauge for Koo to trigger special abilities. You are basically neutered if you aren’t running straight into an enemy just to match the blocking rhythm of attacking. Every so often this is so obnoxiously noticeable that parrying is everything, as perfect dodging does not feed into any of this despite also being a necessity.
Combat is deep, though, since both Emma and Koo are constantly gaining new abilities that change up how you can fight. There is a sort of heavy attack that, rather than being a separate attack, is more of a power move that can be fed into combos for added strength and swapped powers. So you are continually improving. Koo, for its part, is a powerful teammate rather than just something that wanders around. I don’t remember exactly when I unlocked it, but at one point I gained a follow-up to my combos where Koo summons a row of flowers that knock up enemies. This allowed Emma an aerial assault that breaks stagger way quicker. A full extension that is purely beneficial.
Koo’s abilities also add more diversity to the field, though the turn-based aspect that was hyped for the game doesn’t add much meaning. In combat, you can slow time to pick between the wolf’s abilities, which can give you a breather. The abilities do come in handy too, one of which can bind your enemies, and I spammed that one a lot as it creates a solid opening, something that can be challenging to come by otherwise. The whole skill feature, though, amounts mostly to triggering a special ability rather than a switch to gameplay, so it feels like a letdown the way it was sold to.
There are also two massive skill trees, both to influence these abilities that you unlock through the story, making them more powerful or giving you more time on them. There are both skill influences here as well as back-end leveling that improve secondary abilities. A bit of sensory overload is felt as soon as you jump over here. You can see the massive roots of the tree representing it, and this is before you see flowers bloom on the higher portion of the tree.
What’s annoying, though, is that both Emma and Koo get a tree, both with the same insane amount of upgrades, but they share the skill points that feed into this system. This means you have to actively swap between them and be apprised of what changes do. Each skill can have 3-5 levels that get progressively pricier, and you earn these skill points by defeating enemies. This means if you are going for a full collection, there is a lot of grinding you will be expected to do. Even when enemies are hoarding around you, there are typically 5 enemies, each giving you a skill point; sometimes it will be more frustrating than the effort is worth.
It’s the hordes of enemies in general that create the most annoyance in combat. Mainly this is because any time you fight more than one enemy, it makes it easy for one to get behind you and even harder to parry their attack. The lock-on can limit your vision but allow you to control the enemy you are facing, so there is this painful balancing act to survive in these situations. Then add in that damage starts to outpace the weird armor system you get, so an enemy gets behind you, and you are two-hit dead before you can react.
Compounding this, the game has a serious issue with button prompts. There have been an uncountable number of times I have been at half health, trying to back out and heal myself. I am hammering on the up directional button 10-15 times trying to make it work. The same can be said for triggering the slow-mo, which happens mid-fight, so you are probably putting yourself in danger to trigger it, so it won’t trigger after 3-4 presses, likely physically as well. Enemies can clear distances and drag you into sword flurries so quickly that you have a limited window to get out, heal, and then re-engage. It can really mess with your flow. The aerial drop-down attack can also be spotty to trigger, often flashing its functionality. That said, I loved how the Lift ability sets up some fantastic stealth-from-above kills in a way no other game does.
This can be compounded when fighting the big cap-offs to each stage, as they throw a lot at you with each attack. One of the most satisfying things is nailing a chain, dodging out of an attack, then parrying, parrying, and going straight in for the combo. After losing twice to the second boss, a big salamander, I came back angry and utterly destroyed its first stage. I’m talking perfect parrying every attack and dragging it through the mud. Most stages have two stages to combat, full forms. There is something insanely satisfying about going from beating the first form with no health or healing items on one run, only for you to do the same yet with everything on the next.
These enemies are cool and flashy; the issue is they are… And bear with me here… Too big. The issue is that for some of them, a slight turn to the left or the right and their hitbox is unreachable. I found it less easy to dodge while jumping, and you get a better combo on the ground, so you really lose the ability to retaliate in some cases. In others, triggering the slowdown might catch the enemy right as they move to exit your range, effectively burning the entire benefit. The lock-on is what really screws with this, but it doesn’t improve by much if you disconnect and go for the legs.
Verdict
I came into Beast of Reincarnation with some anticipation. I even wrote a whole article about how it won me over during the Xbox Developer Direct. Then I had to listen to the internet dictate how I should feel before I even had a chance to play. There are points in the experience that frustrated the hell out of me. Then, there were other points where I was loving every minute of it, celebrating every win. I think there is something special buried under the muck, and that’s a shame to think about. What a fully realized adventure might have looked like, but I did enjoy what we got. I liked it; sometimes I liked it a lot, even if I never came to love it.
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Reviewed on PlayStation 5, also available on Xbox Series and PC
Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Fictions
Release Date: August 4, 2026
Pros
+Extremely satisfying combat
+Deep unlockable combos and skill tree
+Beautiful world with large areas
+Soundtrack is a high point
Cons
-Gameplay issues like fighting buttons to trigger skills
-Bland characters in a mostly boring story
-Skill tree is sensory overload
-Can be frustrating at times
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Beast of Reincarnation
