Rightfully, Beary Arms preview [PAX] — Bearing your teeth

Daylight Basement Studios has announced a new update for their bullet hell roguelite: Rightfully, Beary Arms, which I was lucky enough to get to play at PAX. The Paws and Claws fashion update promises a good chunk of new content: including weapon augmentations, new run modifiers, and the introduction of cosmetic options.

Play as a cute little bear named “Beary” trying to survive multiple galactic threats. Beary has to fight his way through various dungeons in order to fight bosses—the Galaxy Masters. Naturally, he will need guns to do the job. While the starter weapons have infinite ammo, you’ll want to find something with a bit more firepower. Guns can be found in shops or as rewards for clearing a room, and you get to permanently keep any that you find. Most of the guns are silly, like the Mac 10 and Cheese, basically a box of mac and cheese that shoots, or the Glockamole, a gun that fires off avocados. Then there is the A Salt Rifle, a rifle stock with a salt shaker shoehorned onto the front part of the design. Beyond the patent absurdity of it all, weapons feel good to shoot due to the excellent sound design, and the options for weaponry are plentiful.

The Paws and Claws update will add weapon augmentations to the formula, allowing players more room to increase the potency of their weapons within runs. Augmentations could increase a weapon’s fire rate, sharpen its accuracy, or increase the number of projectiles being sent down range. One aspect of upgrades that this game nails is informing the player of what stats are being boosted and by how much. There are plenty of roguelikes and roguelites out there that just have item descriptions like, “Increases attack speed.” Rightfully, Beary Arms, on the other hand, will clearly highlight what stats are being changed and by how much.

On top of augmentations, there are other modifiers, some of which only last for individual runs, others are permanent buffs to Beary. Runtimes, for example, are typically buffs, such as decreasing enemy spawns in a room, or making them fire slower. There are also Calamities, which you have to choose after defeating a boss that make the game harder. They’re pretty much the opposite of Runtimes, so it is possible to balance them out. The permanent upgrades come from the Prooves skill tree, which is a mix of basic stat upgrades and new abilities called Gambits. When you use a Gambit, Beary might gain speed or knock down enemy projectiles, but you will temporarily lose health until you clear the room.

Beary gets around the galaxy on his rocket ship, stopping to fight at planets to get upgrades before he faces the boss. The map used to traverse the galaxy has a list of all of the locations you can fly to, however, some of them are locked. In order to unlock an area, you need to complete the adjacent dungeon. Clicking on any dungeon will reveal the possible rewards and the percentage change that said rewards will appear.

When it comes to the individual areas, every Galaxy Master has their own domain with its own theme. For example, the leader of the bug faction, Yellow Jacket, has a storm-at-sea-themed area. Why? Because he is quite literally a sentient yellow rain jacket. The puns touch every aspect of this game, there is no escape. The new outfits, the pajamas, are all unlocked by defeating bosses.

In the end, Rightfully, Beary Arms looks very promising with its unique premise of positive and negative run alterations. I look forward to diving deeper into the game when it fully releases, but for now, the Paws and Claws update drops on April 17.

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