Rightfully, Beary Arms Review: A Surreal Shooter with Bizarre Soundtrack

Rightfully, Beary Arms Review: The Best and Weirdest Soundtrack of the Year

Nick Gillett Published January 28, 2026

The name is not the only thing that's strange about this new twin-stick indie shooter. Rightfully, Beary Arms delivers weapons and music that are just as surreal and bizarre as its title suggests, creating a gaming experience that stands out for its peculiar charm.

Roguelite Foundations and Independent Studio Appeal

Roguelites have become a valuable genre for independent studios, offering addictive progression systems and longevity typically associated with bigger budget titles. While games like Hades 2, Dead Cells, and Vampire Survivors dominate the spotlight, numerous lower profile examples exist. Rightfully, Beary Arms emerges as one such distinctive entry in this crowded field.

Surreal Visuals and Eccentric Audio Design

This twin-stick bullet hell shooter unfolds in a surreal semi-dreamland, featuring deliberately messy 8-bit graphics that complement its brilliantly unconventional soundtrack. The audio experience mixes distorted Soviet choral music with Gaelic folk, polka, and various unlikely crossover genres layered over lo-fi beats. The result is a game that looks and sounds deeply idiosyncratic, establishing a unique atmosphere from the outset.

Gameplay Mechanics and Progression Systems

Beginning each run in Beary's bedroom, players discover a chest containing underpowered starter weapons and encounter Paul Stapleton, a monocle-wearing, pipe-smoking fox who shares stories from his therapist. Nearby sits the Proove machine, which sells permanent upgrades in exchange for inspiration points found during runs.

These upgrades allow players to fill perk trees that expand the energy bar, provide better default weapons, and supply augs (the game's term for weapon mods), along with shop discounts and incremental reductions to Beary's dash move cooldown. The dash proves absolutely essential in battle, enabling players to lunge through enemy fire with momentary invulnerability and leap over gaps that would otherwise cause health loss.

Level Design and Combat Challenges

Procedurally generated levels alternate between mostly empty corridors and enemy-filled rooms. Entering combat areas locks doors, with fresh enemy waves spawning as each group is dispatched. Success requires accurate shooting, strategic use of degradable cover, and judicious application of the dash move to navigate otherwise lethal fire patterns.

This version of bullet hell moves at a relatively slow pace, with incoming rounds travelling leisurely, yet remains capable of trapping careless or unlucky players in corners. With an initially short health bar, runs can transform from triumphant to disastrous within seconds of poor decision-making.

Eccentric Weaponry and Power Progression

Players access increasingly eccentric weaponry as they progress. Entry-level options like the Squirt Gun, poison-spewing Cropduster, and spray 'n' pray Mac 10 & Cheese pistol give way to power weapons including the Mosin Nagant sniper rifle and eventually different grades of enhanced weaponry like Checkhov's Gun. The latter arrives with Beary's name supposedly engraved on the barrel, though the blocky graphics obscure such fine details.

Early Game Challenges and Upgrade Systems

The opening hours suffer from reliance on finding decent weapons early. Default starter guns prove so puny that failing to acquire something more useful quickly becomes a death sentence. This problem compounds with upgrades that initially feel underwhelming, though they're designed to stack as players grow more powerful and reach later galaxies (the game's term for levels).

Calamity System and Technical Shortcomings

Alongside upgrades and better guns, players occasionally must choose from three calamities that increase difficulty through extra enemy waves, reduced firing rates, or decreased accuracy. This interesting addition contrasts with the genre's typical focus on powering up rather than down.

Unfortunately, the game suffers from numerous technical problems. Frequent freezes on plain blue screens, with audible but inaccessible action, plagued the experience. While usually resolvable by quitting to the home screen and restarting, these issues proved particularly frustrating following hard-won boss battles and occurred far too regularly.

Overall Assessment and Final Verdict

When functioning properly, Rightfully, Beary Arms offers a pleasingly offbeat take on twin-stick shooting. Its soundtrack stands as genuinely unique, while its weaponry ranges from amusing to inspiring, especially after augmentations. However, initial balance issues create over-reliance on random luck, and surprising technical bugs undermine the experience despite minimal processing demands on Xbox hardware.

In Short: A lo-fi 8-bit style twin-stick bullet hell shooter whose exhilaratingly weird music and catalogue of surreal weaponry is undermined by technical problems and excessive reliance on luck.

Pros: