// PC GAMER — GAMING
Beast of Reincarnation review
Mixing close-range action freneticism with a gorgeous, meditative atmosphere, Beast of Reincarnation is fun, admirable, gorgeous and flawed.
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What is it? A melancholy parry-happy action RPG from the creators of Pokémon gamesRelease date August 4, 2026Expect to pay $60Developer Game FreakPublisher FictionsReviewed on RTX 3060 (laptop), Ryzen 5 5600H, 16GB RAMSteam Deck Officially "Unknown", but unlikely to workLink Steam
Beast of Reincarnation is a sci-fi action RPG whose parry-happy woman protagonist is on a mission to save an apocalypse-blighted humanity. On paper it sounds like Stellar Blade, and in practice, it feels a bit like Stellar Blade. It's open but linear, and ruthlessly focused on speed and dexterity. And yet, while Beast of Reincarnation may draw from the same pool of inspiration—think Sekiro, Final Fantasy, Nier—the net result is cosmically at odds with Shift Up's outing.
Emma is a young woman stricken by the Blight. It's the very same phenomenon that has transformed 41st century Japan into a wasteland of verdant ruins. She entirely lacks emotion thanks to her malady, nor can she remember her life before the illness. To make matters worse, she's an outcast among survivors by dint of her condition. But in exchange she has inherited some gnarly Blight powers, namely the ability to generate aggressive, tentacle-like flora.
The Blight is an infection spread by the titular beast of reincarnation, whose wrath is renewed every hundred years. Though an outcast, Emma and her similarly Blight-infected dog companion Koo are tasked with taking the fight to this mysterious deity-like beast. So off they go, chaperoned by a small crew in a giant military biped which serves as home base.
The flagrantly unoriginal premise seems to promise a bombastic, relentlessly loud spectacle. But entirely to its credit, Beast of Reincarnation is an unusually quiet and patient thing. If Stellar Blade is psytrance with the bass jacked right up, Beast of Reincarnation is psytrance with the percussion removed entirely. I mean, it's essentially a precision-oriented action game, and it can often be very tense, but the whole project is suffused with an elegiac doom. This is a richly atmospheric, melancholy videogame. It took me by surprise.
But let's assess it as an action game first. Emma is a dab hand with a sword, but an even dabber hand at parrying with it. Like Stellar Blade, Beast of Reincarnation is a parry dance and there's just no getting around it, though if you feel vindicated by the sudden popularity of the "parryslop" pejorative, there are ways to loosen things up.
If you're a parry tragic but enjoyed the slightly more forgiving windows of Stellar Blade versus Sekiro, that's basically where Beast of Reincarnation sits on the spectrum.
One way is with projectiles. Emma has a bow and a crossbow, and if you invest in them via Beast of Reincarnation's typically convoluted skill trees, you can make them monstrously powerful. Both can be equipped with three elemental varieties, and ammunition is automatically replenished at bonfires campsites. If I aim my bows mid-air the world slows to a crawl but Emma doesn't, an effect which depletes the "entanglement gauge" I can also manually trigger to slow down time on foot, or to use my special attacks.