After releasing into early access on Steam on January 29th, 2021 the indie first-person shooter inspired by Quake, Hrot is set to fully release on May 16th, 2023. The game’s solo developer Spytihněv took to Twitter to announce the news with a short release date trailer.
Set in an alternative reality Czechoslovakia after an unknown disaster struck the country Hrot channels the very best of early movement-based shooters such as Quake and Blood. The full release announcement marks the biggest addition to the game since the release of the game’s second episode on June 22nd, 2022. With over 2000 reviews on Steam with an ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ overall review score fans are ecstatic about the news of the game’s release with one user commenting, “Masterpiece already. We need a big box version.”
This release date also marks the latest in a long line of updates for the game with version 0.8.0 adding the first mission of episode 3 on March 26th, 2023. The latest episode entitled ‘War with the Newts’ takes inspiration from the work of Karel Čapek and his novel Wolf3D. Alongside this new mission addition, the previous last update also added some new additional experimental features such as:
- You can deflect grenades with a foot kick
- A bottle of wine can be thrown as a Molotov instead of a grenade
- Zoom key, you can see how ugly it looks up close. But be careful if you already have the Mouse3 button mapped to another function.
It’s certainly a surprise to see Hrot releasing so early as in the most recent developer update Spytihněv noted that the game wouldn’t release until May 21st, 2023 at the earliest and that would be if they were attempting to “speedrun dev” the game to completion. The more realistic date for release at the time was June 22nd, 2023 so getting the game even earlier than the mentioned May 21st, 2023 date is likely to put a smile on many fans’ faces. One user also pointed out this release date change hoping that “everything went well and smoothly – as this would constitute some hella speedrun dev.”
Needless to say, Hrot is likely to be high on the wishlist for retro movement-shooter fans if they haven’t already purchased the game during its early access stage. If you haven’t checked out Hrot yet you’ll likely find some enjoyment out of it if you’ve played and enjoyed more recent retro shooters like Dusk or Amid Evil.
