At today's SGF 2025 Xbox Games Showcase, Game Freak—the developer of acclaimed solitaire-based horseracing sim Pocket Card Jockey and, you know, Pokémon—made a surprise appearance to confirm that it's not just the Pokémon company. (Technically, The Pokémon Company is the Pokémon company.) The studio unveiled Beast of Reincarnation, a "one-person, one-dog action RPG" coming in 2026.
Beast of Reincarnation looks like a little bit of Nioh, a touch of Sekiro, a bit of Monster Hunter, and a lot of hitting post-apocalyptic robots and giant mutated creatures with swords. It's set in Japan in the year 4026, where "humanity awaits its inevitable extinction" centuries after the appearance of a "great creature" that "spewed forth blight, corrupting all living things."
You play as Emma the Sealer, a young woman with a cool hat, a cool sword, a dog companion, and the ability to generate plant life that she can use to pull herself to enemies and conjure paths of vines in the air to sprint across. It's a useful talent, and one she seems to make heavy use of while doing Sekiro-style combat against corrupted plant creatures and rampant androids.
Emma, however, apparently isn't just skilled at cutting down mutant megafauna and clinically depressed robots. The reveal trailer, which you can watch above, closes with a voiceover declaring that she's "the blade that will destroy the Beast of Reincarnation" while we watch vines sprouting pure, uncorrupted flowers spread from her sleeping body.
Seems good! Or bad? Hard to say! But we'll find out when Beast of Reincarnation launches on Steam in 2026.
