Beast of Reincarnation

I’ve been playing two games I think are criminally underrated: Rise of the Ronin and Beast of Reincarnation. Full disclosure — I played both through subscriptions, PlayStation Plus and Game Pass, not full price. I make it a habit to play through everything that lands in those libraries. Even when a game looks outside my usual taste, it’s basically free to try, so why not stream it for thirty minutes? There’s little risk. And if a game doesn’t work for me, I challenge myself to ask why it didn’t, because sometimes a game is perfectly well-made — just built for a different audience than the one reviewing it. ...

Beast of Reincarnation just came out, and it’s a genuinely big deal — Game Freak’s first AAA game outside the Pokémon series, directed by someone who spent years on Pokémon’s battle systems and sound design. If you’ve been playing it, or you’re about to, I think you should have Iron Abyss on your radar too. Post-Apocalyptic Without a Clean Fix Beast of Reincarnation drops you into the year 4026, humanity on the edge of collapse, land corrupted by beasts nobody fully understands. Emma and Koo aren’t saving a healthy world, they’re surviving the wreckage of one that’s already mostly gone. Iron Abyss opens from the same emotional place — the world has ended, and you’re not trying to prevent that, you’re descending into what’s left of it to find out why. Neither game offers you the comfort of a world worth saving in its original state. You’re just trying to make sense of what’s left. ...