Arkheron closed beta opens July 15 with PvPvE tower-climbing and Battlerite-style arenas

Arkheron, the isometric PvPvE squad ARPG from Bonfire Studios, kicks off its closed beta on July 15 and runs through July 26. The announcement landed on the game's Steam page, and signups are open through both the Steam waitlist and the FirstLook waitlist.

The game drops squads of three into a tower set in the afterlife, alternating between loot-and-fight floors and showdown arenas — the latter carrying strong Battlerite DNA for anyone who mourns that game's decline. One of the more distinctive design choices is a rotatable isometric camera, which wasn't always part of the plan. CEO Rob Pardo explains that early point-and-click controls just weren't clicking: "As we iterated, that kind of point and click style didn't really work as much as we wanted it to." Game director Jeremy Craig eventually hacked the camera to allow free rotation, and Pardo says the feel shifted immediately — Craig's own words: "As soon as we unlocked that rotation, it started to play like something different." The blend of that swiveling camera with extraction-shooter-style sound awareness is now central to how Arkheron plays. The beta is explicitly a stress test: Bonfire wants to see "how the game holds up with a larger group of players, and whether the changes we've made since Next Fest actually land the way we hope." Each accepted player gets three Steam friend invites automatically, so you can pull your squad in without them needing to queue separately.

Bonfire Studios is the studio founded by Rob Pardo, the former Blizzard chief creative officer behind World of Warcraft and Overwatch. Arkheron has been in development for a while and showed at the PC Gaming Show in June, where it got an extended interview slot — a sign the studio is pushing toward a wider audience. The PvPvE battle-royale-adjacent space has seen a few contenders come and go, and Arkheron's tower-climbing structure gives it a more defined progression loop than most genre peers.

Not every mode runs the full two weeks — Spires, the arena mode, is available throughout, but the competitive Ascension mode only opens during limited windows on Fridays and Sundays. The full schedule is on the announcement post for anyone who wants to plan around those slots.