Rightfully, Beary Arms review – the best and weirdest soundtrack of the year

The name is not the only thing that’s strange about this new twin-stick indie shooter, with weapons and music that are just as surreal and bizarre.

Roguelites are always a useful genre for independent studios. Good ones sustain an addictive sense of progression and provide the sort of longevity that’s usually the preserve of bigger budget titles. Games like the story-centric Hades 2, the almost endless Dead Cells, and Vampire Survivors – which by this point has created its own sub-genre – are just the poster boys; there are innumerable lower profile examples.

The peculiarly named Rightfully, Beary Arms is one of them. It’s a twin-stick bullet hell shooter that takes place in a sort of surreal semi-dreamland, its deliberately messy looking 8-bit graphics are accompanied by a brilliantly complementary soundtrack, that mixes distorted Soviet choral music, Gaelic folk, polka, and plenty more unlikely crossover genres with lo-fi beats. The result is a game that looks and sounds deeply idiosyncratic.

Beginning each run in Beary’s bedroom, you’ll find a chest with a choice of underpowered starter weapons and a fox called Paul Stapleton, who wears a monocle, smokes a pipe, and regales Beary with stories his therapist has told him. Next to him is the Proove [sic] machine, which sells permanent upgrades in return for inspiration points that you occasionally find during runs.

These allow you to fill in perk trees that add more hearts to your energy bar, offer a better default weapon, and supply you with augs, the game’s name for weapon mods, along with shop discounts and an incrementally shorter cooldown for Beary’s dash move. The latter is absolutely essential in battle, letting you lunge through enemy fire with a fleeting moment of invulnerability, and leap over gaps instead of falling through them and losing health.

As you’d imagine, the levels are procedurally generated, and alternate between mostly empty corridors and rooms full of enemies. Walk into one of those and the doors lock, with fresh waves spawning as soon as the last is dispatched. To get through them you’ll need to shoot accurately, use cover (some of which degrades), and make judicious use of the dash to power through otherwise lethal gouts of fire.

This version of bullet hell is quite slow moving, the forests of incoming rounds travelling at a leisurely pace, but it’s still more than enough to trap you in a corner if you get complacent or just unlucky. With an initially very short health bar, it’s amazing how quickly a run can change from triumphant to disastrous in the space of a few ill-considered seconds.

Fortunately, you have plenty of options for your own defence, the pixelated weaponry proving as eccentric as its setting. The entry level Squirt Gun, poison spewing Cropduster, and spray ’n’ pray Mac 10 & Cheese pistol are succeeded by power weapons like the Mosin Nagant sniper rifle and eventually different grades of power weapon, such as Checkhov’s Gun. The latter arrives with Beary’s name engraved on the barrel – or at least that’s what it says in the description, the gun itself is way too blocky to make out that level of detail.

The opening few hours are marred by their reliance on finding a decent weapon early enough. Because default starter guns are so puny, failing to acquire something more useful quickly becomes a death sentence, and it’s not helped by upgrades that often don’t feel terribly useful. They’re designed to be stacked and as you get more powerful, and start seeing later galaxies (as the levels are called), their effects start to get a bit more interesting.

Along with upgrades and better guns, you’ll also sometimes be forced to choose one of three calamities. They make your run trickier, giving a chance of extra waves of enemies, slowing your guns’ firing rates, or reducing their accuracy. You can usually find one that won’t be too deleterious to your chances, and it’s an interesting addition to a genre usually focused on powering up rather than down.

What’s a lot less interesting is the litany of technical problems the game suffers. We lost count of the number of times the game froze on a plain blue screen, the action still audible, but suddenly inaccessible. It was usually still possible to quit to the home screen and restart, but not always. When that happened near the beginning of a run it wasn’t so bad, but when it was after a tough later level boss fight we’d just managed to win, it was downright infuriating, and these were far from isolated incidents.

When it works, Rightfully, Beary Arms offers a pleasingly offbeat take on twin-stick shooting. Its soundtrack is like nothing you’ve ever heard, and its range of weaponry is amusing and sometimes inspiring, especially after adding a couple of augs. Unfortunately, its initial lack of balance and resultant over-reliance on random luck – along with a surprising number of bugs for a game that puts so little pressure on Xbox’s the processor – is very disappointing.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed) and PC
Price: £8.39
Publisher: Daylight Basement Studio
Developer: Daylight Basement Studio
Release Date: 27th January 2026
Age Rating: 7

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