Rightfully, Beary Arms Preview

Rightfully, Beary Arms falls into a category of media I like to call “murderously cute” — cute little creatures doing atrocities. This time, Daylight Basement Studio is giving us a teddy bear with a gun.

So, what is this game? Rightfully, Beary Arms has an 8-bit art style, with multiple different adorable enemies ready to one-shot you to hell. You, playing as Beary, are tasked with dungeon crawling through multiple different settings like: a 1980s-ish bowling alley, a dock, and something akin to the interior of an empty spaceship, all while bopping out to a soundtrack ranging from sea shanties to synth pop. Which setting you get in is completely random and changes every time you die — or, what the game refers to as getting “pixelated”.

Every time you’re pixelated, you’re brought to a screen right before you respawn and forced to choose a calamity. This gives Beary a disadvantage for the next round until you die again. Calamities range from increasing the chances of enemy waves to having less ammo to speeding enemies up. There’s no easy way out because each calamity can obliterate your whole run in different ways if you don’t come up with a strategy. It adds an extra crushing zing when you die again or, alternatively, makes you want to die faster just so you can reset.

You can get a drop at the end of each crawl offering a different perk — sometimes these are permanent, sometimes they aren’t. If you pick a new weapon, you get to keep that through the whole game. If you pick a weapon upgrade, you lose it next time you get close to one too many bunnies. Weapons have the standard stats you’d expect: damage per second, spray range, reload times, and, to add a little extra dazzle, a sex appeal rating.

That brings me to my next point: do not let the cuteness factor trick you. This game hath no mercy. You will get one-shotted by a pig whose only weapon is slapping you with a fish, and you will get emotionally distressed over it.

Each enemy has their own tactics to take you out, and you have to plan accordingly when you see them, but oh. Oh, the goddamn fish pig. The fish pig threatened everything I held dear. The fish pig is death, destroyer of worlds.

The only thing to do when you see the fish pig is to run. Run as far away as possible, shoot as you do it, and pick a god and pray.

If you do manage to make it through one dungeon, you’re brought to a map of the galaxy. Here, you can pick where you want to travel to next. Your computer interface will give you a rating of difficulty for each option and a hint of what boons you might find to lower down the choices.

There’s also this little guy:

Look at them. Bopping away on the loading screen. Delightful. Almost makes me forget about the fish pig.

Rightfully, Beary Arms is a game that kicks your ass but looks cute doing it. I hope that as development goes on, more of a storyline is added to make it a little more coherent and get us hooked on the characters. That said, for a game fresh in Early Access, never mind a dev team of only two people, I have high hopes that it will be fleshed out into a pretty damn solid game.