Beast of Reincarnation isn't ready for Steam Deck or ROG Ally yet, but there's potential
Game Freak's brand-new title, Beast of Reincarnation, launches this week for consoles and PC platforms. Ahead of its release, I had a chance to check out the Steam version of Beast of Reincarnation on Steam Deck and ROG Ally to go over my performance impressions, Steam Deck recommended settings, and more. Game Freak's action RPG is excellent so far with lovely music and a hybrid combat system, but the PC handheld experience still needs some work.
Beast of Reincarnation PC port features
Beast of Reincarnation, developed in Unreal Engine 5, is quite a heavy game to run on PC as you can imagine. The Steam version supports borderless and windowed mode, HDR, ray tracing, uncapped frame rates (30, 60, 120, 144, 240, uncapped), a VRAM limit slider, upscaling (off, TAAU, TSR, FSR 1, FSR 3, and DLSS), upscaling quality, upscaling sharpness, mesh quality options, texture quality options, shadow resolution settings, lighting quality options, a toggle for depth of field, motion blur slider, contact shadow options, and more. Right now, the PC port appears to only support 16:9 aspect ratios as well. It doesn't do 16:10 on Steam Deck and didn't allow me to use 21:9 on my ultrawide monitor even on Windows.
The PC port also has multiple button prompt options including Xbox, PS5, and even Nintendo Switch prompt options in addition to keyboard & mouse prompts. You can also rebind keys and controller buttons from the menu. Beyond that, Beast of Reincarnation lets you adjust mouse sensitivity across aiming and during normaly gameplay across both directions. The only surprising omission here is the lack of UI scaling options and subtitle size options.
Beast of Reincarnation Steam Deck impressions
My impressions in this article are based on the patch that arrived on August 1. I've had the game for about a week before that. My initial impression last week was very positive in the beginning when I played the opening 15 minutes on Steam Deck. Beast of Reincarnation is an Unreal Engine 5 title and those almost always struggle on Steam Deck, but I thought there was potential. After finishing the tutorial area and reaching the open zone, it was basically unplayable on Steam Deck.
With the new patch and using the absolute lowest settings at 720p (since it has no 16:10 support) and with TSR set to Performance upscaling, Beast of Reincarnation delivers a 23-30fps experience. It looks really bad and basically is not a good way to play it right now. Even if I was able to get a stable 30fps with these settings, I wouldn't recommend it because Beast of Reincarnation's art style really suffers with such a low input resolution and with everything turned down.
Beast of Reincarnation Steam Deck recommended settings
My recommendation is to not play it natively on Steam Deck right now. if you absolutely must play Beast of Reincarnation on Steam Deck, you should stream it from another device if you have the option. If you don't want to do that and still want to play it natively, keep in mind that it regularly drops below 30fps into the low 20s and looks very bad. Even turning everything to low and using TSR with Performance upscaling isn't enough. Anything above that results in a slideshow and regular freezing.
Beast of Reincarnation ROG Ally impressions
Moving over to the ROG Ally, Beast of Reincarnation has potential here. When using the same settings as Steam Deck on my Z1 Extreme model ROG Ally, I was able to get a 30-40fps experience, but Unreal Engine 5-related hitching made it a miserable experience. Once things settle down, you can get a decent experience in the same location, but any new asset results in hitching. I even tested this at 30W and had a similar experience. The majority of the six hours I played were in the 25W Turbo Mode unplugged.
In its current state, I don't recommend Beast of Reincarnation on Steam Deck or ROG Ally unless you can stream it from a more capable system. I'm enjoying the game and hope to play it on PS5 or Xbox later in the week. I think the ROG Ally experience can get to a place where I'd recommend it with caveats, but it looks unlikely on Steam Deck without major optimization. If the ROG Ally didn't have the stuttering and hitching issues, it would be at least tolerable at 30fps (or more), but I cannot recommend an experience with this much hitching.
Beast of Reincarnation launches on August 4 for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC (Steam).