Hedon Bloodrite

Hedon Bloodrite is an indie first-person shooter built on a GZDoom foundation, but calling it a Doom clone undersells what developer Zan_HedonDev has constructed here. Yes, you are circle-strafing through corridors and unloading projectiles into demonic hordes, but the game wraps that visceral 90s-shooter core inside a proper adventure structure, with a detailed underground world, readable lore scattered across the environment, actual puzzles, and a protagonist whose culture and motivations are sketched out with more care than you typically find in this genre. You play as Zan, an orc warrior whose homeland is being overrun by a demonic invasion, and the worldbuilding around the orcish civilization is specific enough to feel lived-in rather than decorative. The level design is the game's biggest achievement. Maps are large, sprawling, and deliberately non-linear, rewarding players who backtrack and explore with secrets, lore items, and alternate routes. There is a real sense of place to the underground environments - sewers that connect to industrial districts that connect to ritual chambers - and the spatial logic holds together in a way that many retro shooters never bother with. If you grew up on Hexen or Strife and appreciated games that treated their levels as actual locations rather than just corridors to clear, Hedon scratches that itch directly. The puzzle elements are generally fair and satisfy without grinding the pacing to a halt, though a handful of switches-and-keys sequences can feel opaque if you have not been reading the environmental cues carefully. Combat is fast and kinetic, with a varied arsenal that covers axes, bows, firearms, and magic-adjacent weapons that fit the setting without feeling anachronistic. Enemy variety is solid for a solo-developed title, and encounters are designed around movement and positioning rather than pure DPS checks. This is not a game where you stand still and trade shots. It rewards learning enemy attack patterns and using terrain, which is exactly what the genre should do. That said, the difficulty balance occasionally spikes in ways that feel less like intentional design and more like a room that needed more playtesting. Saves are manual, so frustrated runners will want to save frequently. On the RPG side of things, Hedon Bloodrite is lighter than the genre tag might imply. There are no branching dialogue trees, no class selection screen, and no meaningful build variance in the sense that a CRPG fan would recognize. The RPG influence shows instead through exploration depth, lore collection, and the adventure-game logic baked into its quests. Think of it more as an immersive sim ancestor than a stat-based RPG. For players coming from pure shooter backgrounds that is fine; for anyone expecting character progression systems, dial those expectations back. The narrative payoff is modest but genuine - the world feels coherent and Zan feels like a character with a context, not just a viewmodel. Hedon Bloodrite is built by essentially one person, and that solo authorship shows in both the rough edges and the passionate specificity of its world. The visual style is hand-crafted pixel art running on a three-decade-old engine, which either reads as charming retro craft or technical limitation depending on your tolerance. At its best the game delivers exactly what it promises: a dense, atmospheric underground world where exploration has weight and combat has snap. It is best suited to players who loved the non-linear level design of late-90s first-person games and wished those games had more personality baked into their settings.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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