One week after launch, Beast of Reincarnation sits at a Mixed 61% on Steam and a 73 on Metacritic. Those numbers tell a story, but it’s not the one I’ve been watching unfold in player logs and late-night streams. Game Freak’s post-apocalyptic action RPG is deliberately antagonistic toward its opening hour, and the aggregate scores are capturing exactly the friction the design demands. That’s not the same as saying the game is flawless. It’s saying we’re measuring the wrong thing.
The Prologue Is a Filter, Not a Flaw
The first two hours are rough. Emma’s swordplay feels oddly weighted, Koo’s command menu interrupts the flow instead of complementing it, and the blighted plains of 4026 Japan look more like a tech demo than a lived-in world. I’ve watched the Steam review curve in real time, and the drop-off in sentiment within the first forty minutes is unmistakable. Players call the combat odd, the stuttering on PC and Steam Deck unacceptable, and the story beats cliché. They’re not wrong.
But something shifts right around the hour mark. The parry system clicks, and you realize that slowing time to issue Koo’s abilities isn’t a pause in the action. It’s the action. The dynamic biomes start transforming under your feet, turning familiar plains into corrupted forests that spawn new threats without a loading screen.
By Chapter 3, the players who stuck around aren’t complaining about repetition. They’re theory-crafting parry-point economies and debating the default difficulty versus REINCARNATION hard mode. Filter Steam reviews to over one hour logged, and sentiment flips to Mostly Positive. That isn’t accidental. It’s structural.
What the Scores Aren’t Measuring
Mainstream coverage has latched onto the Soulslike comparison, which does the game a disservice. Yes, there’s a sword. Yes, there’s a dodge. But the core identity is a hybrid command system that no one else is doing right now.
Emma handles real-time slashes while Koo operates on a tactical layer that rewards preparation over reflexes. Pair that with environments that reshape themselves in real time, and you’ve got an exploration pillar that demands attention the combat alone doesn’t earn. We tracked the launch trajectory leading up to August 4, and the warning signs were already there. This was never going to be a safe crowd-pleaser.
The problem is that this depth is buried under Unreal Engine 5 stutters, texture pop-in, and some genuinely monotone dialogue. On Steam Deck, the experience borders on unplayable without aggressive settings tweaks. The stuttering on PC feels like another case of Unreal Engine 5 outpacing hardware optimization, a topic that keeps surfacing whenever console performance gaps make headlines.
I’ve seen players drop the game at the prologue’s halfway point because of pop-in alone, then turn around and warn others that the Metacritic average is bought. It isn’t. The embargo timing was suspicious, sure, but the bigger issue is that review culture isn’t built for games that ask you to suffer before they teach you to swim.
And then there’s the publisher response. When Game Freak confirmed day-one Game Pass availability, it set up a low-risk entry point that now looks like a smart move. You can check the specs on the Xbox Store page, but the real test is whether your patience outlasts the tutorial. Instead of the usual launch-week silence, the studio came out within days and promised story pacing patches within the week. That level of transparency shouldn’t feel radical, but in 2026 it does. It suggests they know exactly where the pain points are and aren’t hiding behind the subscription safety net. Whether that goodwill holds depends on whether the patches tighten the opening or just smooth over the wrong rough edges.
I’m not here to tell you Beast of Reincarnation is a hidden masterpiece. It’s a messy, ambitious game with an identity crisis between its first and fifth chapters. But the conversation around it has been flattened into a number, and that number ignores the most interesting design risk Game Freak has taken in years.
If you’re playing on Game Pass, you’ve got nothing to lose but patience. Give it two hours. If it hasn’t clicked by then, it won’t. Don’t let a Mixed stamp on a store page make the decision for you. Some games earn their audience the hard way. This is one of them.
