Beast of Reincarnation, the soulslike about a girl and her dog battling an array of beasties in post-apocalyptic Japan, came out yesterday, August 4th. Developers Game Freak are already hard at work on patches for it, with the first set to include some “story pacing improvements” that should hopefully help address some of the gripes our Callum highlighted in his freshly published Beast of Reincarnation review.

Game Freak announced on the socials earlier today, August 5th, that they’re “currently planning a series of continuous updates” for the person and pet action RPG. The updates will kick off with a first patch the studio are aiming to deliver “within a week”.

It’ll include some “story pacing improvements”, which Game Freak say are part of “ongoing adjustments” they’ve got planned, giving the impression that revamping Beast of Reincarnation’s tale to the textent you can post-release will be a long-term mission. Post-launch story tweaks seem to be getting more common for games with narratives which earn criticism on release, with Crimson Desert being a recent example that springs to mind.

Whether they actually improve things much is another thing, but it certainly sounds from Callum’s review that it’s worth Game Freak trying to make these pacing tweaks. “I’d forgive the more rigid formula if the game wasn’t also so intent on gating me behind pace-annihilating filler,” he wrote. “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 upcoming patch will also deliver some camera adjustments, bump up the text size, and change Beast of Reincarnation’s default setting from cinematic mode to performance. The latter I’d assume is to help it run more smoothly if you don’t bother touching any of the graphical buttons and knobs.