Beast of Reincarnation

It's incredibly easy to take a short look at Beast of Reincarnation and start making the "We have Nier: Automata at home" jokes. Both games have conventionally attractive swordswomen as their leads; you have fairly extensive mobility options used to get around and explore the ruins of human civilization; a primary and ongoing threat are crazed humanoid machines; the music trafficks in a particular aesthetic style that combines ethereal and soft vocals with driving percussion backing. It feels like the perfect comparison to make, just seasoned with a healthy dose of the hybrid flora/fauna imagery that Alex Garland showcased in his adaptation of Annihilation. These comparisons aren't actually entirely unfair, but as I played more of Beast, I realized they're misdirected; it's pointing to the right franchise but the wrong game. One of my favorite games is Nier. You can pick or choose your version (I've only played the original western release with grizzled Papa Nier), but one of the main things I found compelling about that game was the pervading sense of melancholy tied to the slow and steady collapse of humanity, like a watch that hasn't been wound. Beast of Reincarnation also traffics heavily in that melancholic tone; the feeling is that of a setting where humanity's time is over but it just refuses to read the memo, and the world's waiting for them to get the hint. The game features a found family unit trying to get by in this uncertainty, having a directed goal but no greater purpose. Nier ultimately obscures that melancholy with increasing dread as it becomes more and more apparent that you are complicit in great wrongs; Beast spends nearly all of its runtime instead in that cloud of sadness and aimlessness, on the track of saving a version of humanity that you're not given any particular reason to want to see persist. The characters the game focuses on are broken. Emma has been isolated and shunned her entire life, treated only as a ticking bomb (with a literal explosive collar to keep her in line) to be thrown at the threat of the hybrid maleficts. Kagura is an emotionally and physically abused girl who is attempting to cope by desperately pinning her self-esteem on finding ways to be useful to others. Brad is closed off and seems to have more regard for his intellectual theories about the Beast of Reincarnation than any particular interest in stopping it. Violet has no memories and is herself isolated by only being able to interact with Emma (who is nobody's idea of a great conversational partner). This carries on into the side characters as well to varying degrees, none of which are given significant development, but through these characters it's made clear that any desire to see humanity endure through this trial is being brought into the experience by the player, not grounded in demonstrations about the compassion and community given by the game. Thankfully this melancholy is balanced by Koo, who remains the Goodest Boy, and I felt it largely a mandatory requirement to give him a bath and some pets every time we returned to our mobile base at the end of our time in the field. Beast of Reincarnation does not feature the best melee action combat you've ever seen. It actually feels largely rote for the early chunk of the game, with a limited set of abilities for both Emma and Koo. It's a parry-heavy game, both because it's the best way to mitigate incoming damage, but parrying attacks fuels Koo's malefict abilities, which not only provide good offensive and support bonuses, but act as a source of in-battle heals for Emma and a great way to help eliminate threats. As the game progresses, though, things open up quite a bit and you've got a surprising variety of ways to press the offense, a large number of skills and mods you can assign to Koo, consumables (field crafted by Koo, no less - don't think too hard how he's making poison grenades with those paws), and a rather extensive skill tree for both characters. It's a combat system that ultimately surprised me and remained fresh as I went along while still giving me a decent allowance for skill expression and buildcraft. By game's end I could take out packs of enemies working in tandem with Koo, with combo stealth kills to lead off a fight, weapon combos with flashy AOE impacts and effects, and synchronized finishers. If you ever wanted a visual concept of how a warrior/druid hybrid character in a tabletop RPG could be designed, look no further than Emma's kit, where sword attacks create giant flowers and plants on the field to damage or immobilize foes. This extends into map exploration, where Emma has surprising agility and mobility from the jump using her blight-based vines to get around. Rather than a broader map, Beast is a series of smaller regions with plenty of secrets to find but also a fairly linear route to progress if you just want to continue forward. In another example of the game perhaps giving a mistaken early impression, the first region is perhaps the most open-ended in design and approach; there's no particular concern overall if you just want to treat the game as a series of linear levels, you'll be given the tools to succeed either way. In the end, Beast of Reincarnation is not going to hit any must-play lists, but it's a reasonably solid melee action game with flaws that largely boil down to enemy repetition and some underdeveloped systems, the kind you'd see in a team's first outing (which it very much is). Its strengths lie more in its tone and aesthetic, which makes it harder to recommend purely because everyone's going to feel differently about them, and someone else might just find Emma to be boring and Kagura to be clingy and annoying. For me, however, that pervading melancholy struck the right nerve for me, and I was happy to see it through to its conclusion.