Since I’m not trying to play every classic FPS of this new wave in the genre revival (especially since a lot of them are not good), I don’t pay attention to many of them as they pop up. HROT, though, had a curious style and a… “vibe”, I guess, that got me curious about the project back in 2021 when it was still in Early Access. Now that the full game is out and I had a chance to shotgun my way through it, I gave it a go and… It’s quite odd, but mostly in a good way.
While this title seems to draw most inspiration from Quake, there are plenty of identifiable other influences as well. The interactivity on the levels is closer to Build Engine games (specifically Duke Nukem 3D), there are a couple of Half-Life aspects here and there. But the visual style and overall feel of the combat is indeed closest to the original Quake, which is a great reference to stick with as it still feels great.
But the game built on this clearly “influenced by” foundation is very different and… quite odd. In a way, it suffers from the classic shareware FPS issue of the first Episode (of three) being the most cohesive and well done. Not that the two remaining Episodes are bad, but they rather quickly stop giving a damn about any kind of logical connections and visual and “narrative” cohesion and become, at times, completely surreal. It starts as something like You Are EMPTY, but done well – a game with a clear style and theme, rather pure approach to classic level design, refined for the tastes of 2023 audience. But then turns into a mishmash of unfinished ideas, levels that are build as a one giant reference to something, levels that have a weird gimmick, sudden jumpscare-filled horror themed levels and whatever else that came to the developers’ minds. I can’t even begin to describe what state of confusion I was for the majority of Episode 3.
It does play quite well most of the time. There are crappier (and usually, but sadly not always, one-off) enemy types, there are levels that get confusing and there are weapons that don’t feel as great as one would expect them to be (or they feel great but rarely get ammo pickups). But most of the time, it is full of fun combat encounters, cool shooting and exciting exploration. And it’s great that most (if not all) levels remain fully backtrackable right until you press a button to finish a level.
Quite possibly, a lot of references, jokes and just things will be lost to many players who don’t know much about Czech history or didn’t live in the Eastern Europe when Soviet Union still existed. For me, being a Ukrainian born during that time, I did recognize a lot of things that were same or similar to my own experiences or were related to products or things that were imported from Czechoslovakia. But I also had to look up a lot of things afterwards just to understand what was that all about. Like one of the levels that’s based around a famous Karel Čapek novel that I haven’t read myself, or the nuances of the Hussite movement that I had only superficial knowledge of. It’s odd, honestly, how the game is chock-full of such things, but seemingly more just to have them instead of trying to share a story or give any kind of judgement to the era it references. It’s more about “vibes” and “member berries”. Apart from the bosses, I suppose, though even the game is more bizarre than pointed.
HROT is not going to be a title I’d be recommending on the same level as DUSK or even AMID EVIL. It won’t have the same appeal as Prodeus either and, weirdly enough, even Chop Goblins might be easier to recommend because of how approachable and simple that game is. Already mentioned You Are EMPTY, for how poor its design was quite often, is also easier to understand, I feel, without a reference and strangeness overload that HROT might have. But nonetheless, I can easily recommend this game as for all its occasional poor decisions and for how surreal it becomes, not always in a good way, it’s a really fun game that understands the basics of a classic FPS design really well.