Our favorite gruesome Sovietcore boomer shooter is leaving early access next week

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Don't forget to smooch some portraits and read your Lenin while you're blasting horrors and playing with dolls.

HROT
(Image credit: Spytihněv)

Hrot has consistently been boomer shooter excellence, setting itself apart from the pack with its unique 1980s Czechoslovakia setting, phenomenal gunfeel, and diabolically clever levels. Now solo developer Spytihněv is gearing up to release its third and final act, The Gastroscopy, on May 16.

If episode three continues the trajectory of Hrot's second act, the best of this singular shooter is yet to come. Episode one, "Kiss me Gustav," really set the stage, but things just flew off the handle in "The Degustation." My favorite level, E2M7: Granny's Valley, sees you slowly unraveling a tightly-wound level design knot of keys and backtracking on a remote farm that culminates in quite possibly the funniest (and one of the most effective) jump scares I've seen in any media.

And Hrot is just one of the funniest games I've ever played. Like Dusk, everything in Hrot is suffused with this impish, trolling sense of humor. Take a break from blasting atomic horrors to take a fully rendered low-poly dump, then flush it. You can also play around with model train sets, or maybe enjoy an in-game bootleg of Game and Watch skinned like the Soviet cartoon, Nu, Pogodi! (the same one that got Atomic Heart's devs in hot water over a racially insensitive clip included in the game) if that's more your fancy. Spytihněv has also been sharing teasers of a "near-realistic astronomical clock simulator" you can play around with in The Gastroscopy.

Each episode ends with a recipe, a further motif of consumption and digestion in Hrot, and I can't wait to see the third and final dish join the ranks of episode one's beef stroganoff and two's cauliflower brain. Look for our full review of Hrot shortly after launch, and you can start playing its first two acts right now for $20 on Steam. 

Ted Litchfield
Associate Editor

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.