Steam Next Fest: Arkheron is a competitive gauntlet packed with a ton of promise

I have a confession for you: Yes, I champion humble indie games where you uncover a twee love story or explore a whimsical world of secrets. But I’m also a sweaty try-hard who loves games about stunting on your opponents. When I play games like League of Legends or Overwatch, I go competitive. I have opinions on the competitive balance of shotguns in various games. I like to win, and winning is at its sweetest when the game is built as a competitive arena. 

Perhaps this is why I found myself fascinated with Arkheron, a new game from Bonfire Studios, a California-based developer team stacked with various veteran developers from Blizzard, Riot, and other teams.

It’s rare that I finish a press demo and feel myself itching to return to the game; usually, I’m relieved that I’m no longer in a room with strangers, worried I’m going to play terribly in front of an audience of my peers and the game’s developers. After finishing my Arkheron demo, I had the unusual urge to ... play more Arkheron. I don’t know if it has the juice to compete with the massive glut of competitive live service games on the market, but based off my time with the game so far in press previews and early demos, I’m optimistic. 

Arkheron will be available as part of the next Steam Next Fest, which means the demo will be available for a much larger audience — and if you have the time and inclination, I think you should give it a shot.

Arkheron is an interesting game because it borrows liberally from several successor multiplayer titles, taking bits and pieces from shooters like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, top-down games like League of Legends and Diablo, and PvPvE games like Escape from Tarkov. When a game is built out of so many disparate pieces, drawing inspiration from so many sources, it can be very easy for the entire thing to devolve into a sort of live service slurry. Arkheron is so impressive because it merges all of these elements together beautifully, creating something that feels familiar but plays out uniquely. 

There’s a core gimmick that turns the game from more of a smorgasborg of satisfying mechanics and into its own beast altogether: the item unlocks. See, there’s a whole host of Eternals, characters with backstories and unique kits. In most games, you’d pick an Eternal right off the bat. Arkheron refuses to be so straightforward. You begin as an Echo, a lost soul fighting for some chance at salvation. When you first drop on the lowest levels of the spectral tower, you’re just a helpless little baby. 

Players are put into teams of three, with a top-down perspective. It’s similar to the Diablo games in terms of both fantasy and overall perspective. Each team starts by scrambling around, unlocking chests and finding starting items to fill their four slots: weapon, off-hand weapon, crown, amulet. Each item can offer passive stats, or an active ability. A pair of axes or a powerful greatsword can dish out massive amounts of damage, but require me to get close. Ranged weapons are lower risk, but demand precision. These weaknesses can be overcome, or strengths can be augmented, with the crown and amulet items.

If I collect all four of an Eternal’s items, I can then ascend, becoming that Eternal — and I get their unique Ultimate as part of the deal, too. Or, I can mix-and-match different Eternal abilities with standard Echo items, creating a unique combination of items. I sacrifice the raw power of a cohesive kit and an Ultimate ability for the unexpected power of combining, say, an invulnerability item with a high cooldown reduction item, allowing me to wisp around the battlefield as a puff of smoke, untouchable by my foes.

If I die but my teammates survive, they can resurrect me – it means I’m back in the game, but forced back into the desperate scramble for items. My entire team can die, which knocks us out of the game early, but that’s a common fate with competitive games. The map is large enough, and enough items afford evasion or escape abilities, that a careful team can avoid being knocked out with a little foreplanning and communication.

Each match plays out with teams discovering items and cobbling builds together until the timer eclipses, at which point everyone needs to rush to a safe haven and wait to ascend to the next level. This adds another nice note of variety; some matches, you’ll run into two other teams rushing into a safe zone, and a brawl ensues. In other games, everyone is avoiding each other and trying to get the best loadout possible before a few, lethal, final battles in the tower’s highest tiers. 

This is where Arkheron is at its most chaotic and compelling. Seeing a full Eternal is intimidating, because you know they have their Ultimate – but it also can be comforting, because you have an idea of what to expect. Seeing characters with makeshift kits can be intimidating, because with so many item combos and active effects, you don’t really know what they’re capable of. In one game, I encountered a character who could build a giant wall of black ice – think Anivia from League or Mei from Overwatch, and the ability to pull us into the middle of a vortex. Trapped together, with the wall blocking our escape, the enemy team quickly mopped us up in a brawl both impressive and slightly embarrassing.

It’s possible that this is another Highguard situation; it’s a perilous time to launch a new live service game, and the launch window feels more all-important than ever. I think that would be a damn shame; there’s no real online title that’s really like Arkheron right now, and I think the novelty of the overall package might be enough for it to secure a place among the pantheon of commonly played online games. As a sweaty try-hard, I’m looking forward to diving back in during Next Fest and seeing if it still scratches that same itch. 

If I’m lucky, a bunch of other competitive gamers will find a similar thrill in the game, and we’ll get to see what Bonfire Studios has in store. Steam Next Fest might serve as the perfect soft launch, and we’ll have to see whether Arkheron earns early momentum from this public demo.