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Game Freak’s Beast of Reincarnation arrived earlier this month, and the reaction has been a little iffy. It holds a respectable 73/100 aggregate score on Metacritic—lining up quite nicely with our own 73% review—but the response on Steam is “mixed,” with many user reviews expressing some variation of “close, but not quite.” And for that, game director Kota Furushima is sorry.
“I honestly feel that there are still areas in the game that require our sincere attention,” Furushima said in an interview with 4Gamer (via Automaton). “I’m truly sorry that parts of the game haven’t provided a sufficiently enjoyable experience.”
Furushima acknowledged that some elements of the game “need polishing,” and said that more updates, following the first on August 9, are on the way to address issues with story pacing, add frame generation, and give players the option to skip cutscenes. It doesn’t sound like changes to the game’s difficulty are too high on the priority list, though: Furushima said his intent wasn’t to make Beast of Reincarnation a particularly difficult game, but simply to ensure players needed to work effectively with Koo, the Blight-infected canine companion, in order to succeed.
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And while the game needs work, it’s not a train wreck: Furushima said the co-op combat “has been well-received, and we’ve also received positive reactions regarding the overall atmosphere of the game. I think the unique post-apocalyptic vibe of the world is resonating with many players.”
That last part in particular fits with PC Gamer Australian editor Shaun Prescott’s take on the game. “There’s a maturity and patience to the presentation that feels more filmic than even the Hollywood-aping fare that Sony doles out (or used to),” Shaun wrote in his review. “Game Freak loves its long, slow, lingering shots. It loves a strangely resonant silence.
“No one quips. There are no quirky asides or overbearing teaching moments. Characters speak elliptically, or else with an unguarded sincerity just a touch removed from JRPG mawkishness. It is severely committed to its bereft, enveloping ambience, and feels like it was made by a team blissfully unaware of Star Wars or the MCU.”
That sounds to me like a pretty strong starting point for Furushima’s ambitions.
