Arkheron closed beta starts July 15 for major stress test
Arkheron’s closed beta opens July 15 for two weeks, with Bonfire using it to stress-test the tower-climb squad ARPG after Next Fest feedback. Invites include three Steam friend passes.
Arkheron’s closed beta will open July 15 and stay up for two weeks, with Bonfire Studios treating the run as a real stress test after Steam Next Fest exposed problems in performance and new-player onboarding.
Access will roll out through the Steam and FirstLook waitlists, and players selected for the beta will receive three Steam friend invites so they can pull in a squad quickly. Anyone already in the Friday and Saturday playtests will be automatically invited.
Arkheron is an isometric PvPvE battle-royale-style squad ARPG built around climbing a tower in the afterlife. Teams of three move through floor-based looting and combat before the run shifts into showdown arenas. The beta will add Spires, a 3v3 mode built around build creativity and combat, while Ascension will run only during limited Friday and Sunday tests.
Bonfire is also using the beta to push onboarding. Learning Spires will serve as a simplified entry point, with bots teaching the item system and Eternals step by step. Enemy counts will scale with the number of players queued, so some beta formats will support solo or team play. Cosmetics progression will debut through Pages and a Closed Beta Collection, and only three Prestige rewards, a title, a banner and a skin, will carry over after the beta ends.
Bonfire first revealed Arkheron in January 2025 after private playtesting had already been underway since 2024, and it tore down and rebuilt combat four separate times before locking in the current version. In a July 9 livestream recap, Bonfire prioritized optimization after Steam Next Fest, including parallelizing render submission with simulation to save about 7 to 8 milliseconds on average and rewriting the VFX system to improve GPU performance.
In Europe, the closed beta will begin at 6PM BST, 7PM CEST and 5PM UTC. Ascension Mode will run there on July 17, 18, 24 and 25 from 7PM to 11PM BST, 8PM to 12AM CEST and 6PM to 10PM UTC. Bonfire, which says it is based in Irvine, California and that Arkheron is its first original IP, has HYBE IM lined up to publish the game in Korea and Japan.
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