Beast Of Reincarnation opened pretty promisingly. Its first stretch dropped me into a sprawling fantasy forestscape full of deadly spore-sprouting woodland creatures, gave me a sick hat and a fireball-shooting dog, then strapped a katana in my hand and introduced a real solid parry clang that would fire dopamine into my brain every time I landed it.
Considering the generous parry window let me effortlessly deflect the boulder-sized suckerpunches of a 9ft grizzly bear, I figured this was shaping up to be a very pretty and particularly accessible Sekiro-like. And what’s more, it was from the minds behind Pokemon, Game Freak, who were trying something very different after being trapped making games under the beady, all-seeing eye of a kawaii yellow rat for so many decades. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to realise the cool hat, the fireball-shooting dog and a satisfying parry clang were a cunning facade.
Beast Of Reincarnation is, in fact, a big old wad of chewing gum for the brain. I got the sweet taste up front, before it quickly squished down to the slimy, flavourless nothingness I continued chewing on autopilot.
Fundamentally, Beast Of Reincarnation is a soulslike hailing from clan Sekiro. You play as Emma, a ruthlessly apathetic sci-fi samurai known as a “Purifier,” who, alongside her loyal companion Koo, has been tasked with slaying the titular Beast of Reincarnation and saving the world. It turns out this involves a lot of slashing, parrying, stealth-attacking and stat-allocating over twelve open-zone levels, each concluding with a boss fight against a big ol’ piss-off woodland creature in the vein of Shadow Of The Colossus’ Colossi.
Despite having such overt inspirations, I found its combat a little clumsier than your typical FromSoft or Team ICO joint. Expect floaty movement, janky camera angles, and, particularly, some questionable balancing issues. It was somewhat amusing that a colossal monster deer that’s accessed its latent forest god final phase form would be able to leverage its power to give me the video game equivalent of a stubbed toe, yet an average Joe android wandering the woods in search of a purpose would cleave Emma (and her fancy hat) into two evenly sized pieces with a couple stray hits.
I was, at least, having a good time with the fundamentals. Much like Sekiro, the game revolves around dealing posture damage to break through an enemy’s guard, which you whittle away with well-timed parries. Parrying reduces posture, and when it depletes, you can execute an extravagant final blow. On the other side, Emma’s own posture bar (known as the Entanglement Gauge) is used smartly, too. It builds throughout the fight and will drain as you block attacks, but can be spent to slow down time and attack enemies unthwarted, making for a clever little risk vs reward system.
Game Freak have chucked some other fresh ideas in there too. Koo loosely harkens back to their Pokemon roots by essentially being an adorable auto-turret that shoots status inflictions. You can pause the action to call on his magical abilities, which let you exploit your enemies’ weaknesses and build up passive damage. Out of combat, Emma can also make bridges with her stretch-armstrong ponytail and access raised ledges by using a rising hair column as a double jump, both of which make for enjoyably freeing ways to traverse the map.
After slashing through its first three zones and standing tall over the remains of their pushover Nushi bosses, I was broadly satiated with this mix of familiar but solid mechanics. It was hardly revolutionary, but a nice, relatively breezy soulslike with some original bits for flavour. I looked over to my new friend, Jimmy Beast Of Reincarnation, and said, I can’t wait to see how you play around with all these nifty mechanics! And in return, he laughed awkwardly, stared at his grubby hooves and proceeded to silently trot backwards out of the room.
Because, from the moment I arrived in the fourth zone, I was a little confused to find the same shade of generic forest map. What’s this? The same slew of enemies I’ve now fought for seven hours? Yet another Nushi boss that I must locate and fight, just for him to flee to the final boss encounter, where he uses the exact same attack pattern? Only then did it sink in: this was it. Beast Of Reincarnation has nothing else, no tricks up its sleeves or hidden gotchas to flip everything on its head.
It’s hour after hour of the same bland environments, fighting the same enemies, doing the same tired routines that were, for a while, novel. It says a lot that the most engagement I had with the game in its later hours was when Game Freak shoved me in a small room with three headless samurai androids. As became a staple of multiple battles in the aftermath, they proceeded to all simultaneously unleash endless combinations of unsynchronised swipe attacks at me while jamming me into the corner of the room. I was frustrated, but man, at least I was thinking about something other than my dinner last night.
I’d forgive the more rigid formula if the game wasn’t also so intent on gating me behind pace-annihilating filler. My bugbear with Game Freak has long been its tendency to tell purposefully barebones stories that saunter into the room before slobbering on the scenery anyway, and they don’t kick the trend here. I lost it every time I’d pop back to the mobile central hub, The Cleanse Walker, only to get trapped in a sickly sweet and agonisingly long cutscene where Emma would be asked, for the fifth time, to finally tell the base’s resident child chef what her favourite food is.
The issue isn’t that it’s trying to invest me in the story. It’s the fact that I’ve seen this exact story multiple times, done better, with more heart and less fanfare. I don’t particularly want to watch three lifeless characters standing motionless, their thousand-yard stares burning holes into each other while they vomit out the next beat of their character arc. I want to hit a sick parry, impale a robot and look cool as hell while doing it.
It winds up a game that I’m pretty thankful to see the back of, purely because I had no strong emotion towards any of it for the last twenty hours of my playthrough. Just tumbleweeds through my subconscious. If anything, it almost felt like it was taunting me by the final act, handing me reskinned bosses that I’d hazard even calling reskins, considering they looked identical, had identical move sets, and even the short execution cutscenes I’d enact to finish them off were – what else? – identical.
Fittingly, for a game with Reincarnation in the title, it throws its best ideas at you from the jump, and then churns them back up, over and over again, for what feels like eternity. And if I had to spend eternity anywhere, being cramped in a corner while three headless robo-samurai dice me into small fleshy pieces would be quite low on the list.