Road to Vostok is a Finnish indie, hardcore, single-player, Wide Open Survival Sandbox Tactical First-Person Shooter. The game was made by a solo developer, Antti Leinonen, a former Finnish army lieutenant and game development teacher. The game is inspired by games such as DayZ, Escape from Tarkov, and Project Zomboid, and was released onto Steam's Early Access on April 7th, 2026. The game is notably made on the Godot engine, after the developer ported the entire game from the Unity engine in protest of Unity's 2023 decision to retroactively charge developers for every user download of their game.
Road to Vostok takes place on the Finnish-Russian border, after an unspecified regional societal collapse partially caused by escalating hostilities initiated by NATO following Finland's joining of NATO in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Players take the role of an injured traveler who was rescued by locals and put up in a tiny local cabin which was abandoned due to being constructed with asbestos. Seeking better supplies, the traveler seeks to travel east across the border to the Russian city of Vostok. Along the way, the traveler must contend with local bandits, corrupt foreign peacekeepers, and the hostile Russian military.
One of the game's most notable features is that it will permanently delete your save file and all progress you've made if you die in the Vostok area, which has the best loot and the most difficult enemies, making exploration of the endgame Vostok region an extremely high-risk, high-reward endeavor.
Road to Vostok contains examples of:
- A.K.A.-47: Most of the game's weapons are slightly re-named from their real-world equivalents. For example, the MP5 submachine gun is called the PM-5, while the Makarov pistol is called the Karov. One notable exception is the KAR-21, a recently developed Finnish rifle which even features a full 3D model of the gun from the game on the manufacturer's website.
- All-or-Nothing Reloads: Averted; magazines are separate inventory items which you need to fill with individual bullets in the inventory screen, and which are swapped out when you reload. Guns with an internal magazine such as bolt-action rifles or pump-action shotguns need to be reloaded one bullet at a time, and manually cycled after each shot.
- An Interior Designer Is You: You can purchase storage cabinets and other furniture from the traders and place them around your safehouse. Given that your safehouse starts out very barebones, placing down storage cabinets is pretty important to have space to stash and organize all your loot.
- Bilingual Bonus: Ambient dialogue such as radio broadcasts and trader chatter are in unsubtitled Finnish. While everything critical for gameplay or quest progression will be in English text, knowing Finnish helps flesh out context and world-building.
- Bulletproof Vest: Chest rig plate carriers can be obtained and worn as armor. Realistically, they require separate ballistic plates to be inserted to truly be effective.
- Continuing Is Painful: When you die, you permanently lose everything you had equipped or were carrying in your inventory, and have to start over using whatever supplies you've stockpiled at your safehouse. If you die before even having the chance to stock up a decent cache at your safehouse, you're probably better off just starting a new game.
- Determined Homesteader: It's mentioned that some locals, called "Nomads", remain in the area despite the societal collapse, mandated evacuation, and bandit activity. While you won't actually meet any in the game besides the 3 traders, the first trader mentions that your character was found by the Nomads while seriously injured and brought to the cabin which serves as your first safehouse. Nomads are planned to be added later in the game as a neutral/friendly faction, akin to the Loners in S.T.A.L.K.E.R..
- Do You Want to Haggle?: The game has no currency system - instead, you trade with traders by bartering with whatever objects are currently in your inventory. Traders also charge you a significant "tax" which initially amounts to nearly double the value of whatever you want to buy. You can low the tax of each individual trader by doing tasks for them, which typically involve finding and retrieving various items for them.
- Excuse Plot: Other than the opening radio transmission that gives a very vague setup as to what's going on, the game has no real plot in its initial Early Access release other than traveling east to get to Vostok for better loot. The Events calendar promises that the final Event is a radio transmission from the same source that started all this, which will reveal more, but if you survive the full game and live long enough to hear the transmission it turns out to just be the radio voice singing Levan Polkka.
- Fackler Scale of FPS Realism: Heavily on the realistic side, from the more-complicated-than-usual weapon handling mechanics, survival mechanics, and advanced injury and medical treatment systems.
- Gangsta Style: You can cant your gun 45 degrees, which is helpful for point-shooting at closer range when you have a large vision-obstructing scope mounted on top of your gun.
- Grid Inventory: Seemingly inspired by the ones in games like Escape from Tarkov and DayZ.
- Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: A waist-high barrier formed by yellow caution tape stretched between posts marks the perimeter of each map.
- Nice Day, Deadly Night: Inverted; at night, your vision is significantly obstructed, but so is that of your enemies, allowing you to move across the map more safely. Conversely, enemy vision is at its peak at high noon, during which they can snipe you across the map from up to 200 meters away.
- One Bullet Clips: Heavily averted - magazines need to be individually loaded with rounds in the inventory screen before combat. Also, weapons like the bolt-action Mosin rifle or the pump-action shotgun have to not only have each bullet manually inserted (which uses a completely separate keypress from the normal reload button), but also need to be manually cycled after each shot with the reload button.
- Permadeath: Dying in the Vostok area permanently deletes your save file, forcing you to restart the entire game from the beginning. The highest difficulty is also a Final Death Mode which applies this to the entire game.
- Regenerating Health: Averted hard. Not only do you not regenerate health, but the game completely averts Hyperactive Metabolism and unlike many other survival games you won't regain health from eating food or resting. The only way to restore lost health is with healing items, which can be relatively rare to find.
- Roaming Enemy:
- After Day 5, the Punisher will start driving around some of the maps in a stolen police van, blaring the siren and blasting hard bass through the speakers. If he spots you, the Punisher and two minions will get out of the van and relentlessly chase you down with automatic weapons.
- Vostok is patrolled by military BTRs which will machine gun you to death if you cross their path.
- Quality over Quantity: Only a few enemy NPCs are active on any given map at the same time, and if you manage to kill 10 of them they stop respawning and you're free to loot the map until you reset it by transiting to another map (including a safehouse). However, combat in the game is extremely hardcore and a single bandit is more than capable of wiping you out even with a dinky Karov pistol if you're careless or unlucky.
- Self-Surgery: A serious enough injury can cause heavy bleeding, which will kill you in a very short period of time if you don't have a tournaquet to stop the bleeding. Being shot in the head will also kill you in a short period of time even if you survive the initial shot, unless you have a specialized surgery kit to treat the injury.
- Video Game Caring Potential: It's possible to rescue a cat in a cardboard box and bring it back to your hideout, where it will be waiting for you whenever you return. The cat will die if you get killed while carrying it, and it also needs to be fed every 11 in-game hours or else it will starve to death. The cat is a unique NPC, and if it dies, it's permanently dead for the rest of that playthrough and you won't find another one.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: As with many survival games, you need to keep your hunger and thirst meters filled up to avoid dying of dehydration or starvation. Food is also one of the primary ways to restore your mental health, which you also need to maintain.