Closed beta weekend, 21-23 August
OVERVIEW
This closed beta weekend ran from 21 to 23 August 2026 and is over. It was the first of two: a second closed beta runs from 3 to 6 September 2026, and our page on it carries the current details. At the time, the Steam store page stated that pre-ordering guaranteed access, that anyone else could request access through the Steam playtest system for a chance to be included, and that buyers should request a refund if the beta did not convince them — an unusually direct thing for a store page to say. We are keeping this page as a record of what was announced, not as advice you can still act on.
HISTORY
The beta was announced alongside the Early Access date on 11 August 2026, and Insider Gaming quoted BULKHEAD’s chief executive framing it as the point of taking pre-orders at all — rather than asking players to take the studio’s word, every pre-order includes hands-on access. A closed test had already run before that: PC Gamer published its account of playing a test build on 11 August 2026.
WHAT IT CHANGES IN PRACTICE
For anyone deciding what to do this week, the practical shape is simple. Guaranteed access costs a pre-order. A free request costs nothing and guarantees nothing, and Steam publishes no selection criteria and no deadline. As of 17 August 2026 the request button is live on the store page. We are not publishing participant numbers or odds — nobody has published them.
WHAT PLAYERS GET WRONG
This page has a short life and we would rather say so: after 23 August 2026, everything on it is history. What it is genuinely useful for is the days before, and the one thing worth understanding is that a free request is a lottery ticket rather than a plan. Our page on the Early Access date covers what happens after the beta ends. Corrected on 3 September 2026, and the correction matters more than the page. Until today this page told you that no official recap of the weekend had been published. That was wrong: BULKHEAD published one on 24 August 2026, in the news feed of its own store page, under the title Beta Recap & Next Steps. We missed it because we were watching the store page itself and not the feed attached to it — the channel where the studio actually announces. It is a declared source of ours from today. What the recap says is short, and it is worth being precise about: the beta is over, the turnout was large, milestones were hit and lessons learned. It gives no player count, no findings and no technical detail, and it uses the space to point at a major announcement scheduled for 3 September at 19:00 BST on a Twitch broadcast. So we still cannot tell you what the weekend established about the game — but a recap exists, we should have read it, and saying it did not exist was our error rather than a gap in the record. What we can say is what came next: BULKHEAD scheduled a second closed beta for 3 to 6 September, and described that one as a scale test rather than a preview.
Early Access makes the game itself citable. We will re-check this entry against the game, confirm or correct what it says, and update the checked date. If anything here turns out to be wrong, this page will say so — and say when we learned it.
THIS ENTRY WAS LAST CHECKED 17 AUGUST 2026 · NEXT RE-CHECK 10 SEP, 2026