Taiga Farmhouse shitter!

Greetings from scenic Taiga! When you first enter this zone, there’s a whole kerfuffle as you’re ambushed by a forest tribe, and then rescued from drowning by a beautiful forest warrior. When you finally stagger to your feet, you’re outside a tumbledown farmhouse. And right there, this gorgeous, rustic shitter is waiting for you; its door open wide, without words it seems to ask, “Are you okay?” There’s even a heart on the door! A great omen right at the start of this zone.

Slave “Quarters” shitters!

This one is hard to look at, brigade. So if you have a heart beating inside your chest it is gonna ache when you get a load of this shit.

In the Caspian Sea segment of Metro: Exodus you’ll have to crawl through a sewer, and within the caverns you’ll find a truly terrible sight. Some group associated with The Baron keeps slaves down here. There are vicious dogs, cages for animals and people alike, cardboard sleeping mats, and just all around heartbreaking shit. It’s hard to look at, but note how the slaves have to sleep right next to the shitters. No one should have to live like this. The Baron and his evil crew truly have no humanity, and deserve everything they get. I came back through here after my no-kill run and cracked their skulls like watermelons!

Spider Bunker shitters!

So dedicated am I, dear Brigade, to bringing you the ultimate gaming restroom experience that I paused halfway through this deathdrap to bring you these shitters in the Spider Bunker! As relieved as I was to find these, I have to admit I was shitting myself as I tried to capture some memories while avoiding attacks from oversized, photophobic spiders and scorpions. I’m talking the size of Neapolitan Mastiffs. Apparently the tiny flashlight on my hat is enough to scare them away, and I made it out alive, but as you can see from my visor, I got fucked up in the process. I regret nothing!

Fancy a spot of tea with the Admiral, love?

I’m guessing you’re like me, and when you stole that tugboat to infiltrate the Baron’s compound, you didn’t know you’d be entering the last nuke code into the Admiral’s insanity launch sequence. But that’s what happened. The Admiral’s been through some shit and this is how he’s managed to cope: ‘Not well.’ Since the tugboat incident, he’s been hiding out in the swamp. You can visit him at his quaint cottage home (a loft in a rotting barn), where he entertains corpses and argues with himself. Laugh a little, cry a little with Admiral Batshit and try to resist the enviable hospitality of his Swamp Bungalow. He offers you tea made from local wildcrafted mushrooms (yeah, I’m not drinking this), and a peace pipe stuffed with some herbs he swears will silence the demons (and I’m not smoking that). If you don’t much fancy reminiscing about the glory days, you can try guessing how many partial card decks he collected to make that tablecloth, or if you’re feeling really adventurous/bored/compassionate, pry that guitar from his pal’s dead claws and sing Admiral Batshit a lullaby. Once he’s asleep, snag a postcard from the wall before gtfo of there.

Enemy Camp shitters!

Playing through the storyline of the main Metro: Exodus quest will bring you to this enemy camp in the Taiga territory. The highlight of the camp is definitely this bank of outhouses! Note how the two flanking structures are blocked off, showcasing a central, slightly raised shitter, which serves an additional purpose as a shrine to a JEM! looking rockstar lady. An accordion and book stashed inside implies this shitter is a place of inspiration and culture for the people who live here. After civilization collapses you’re not gonna have have a mobile phone to bring with you to the crapper, but an accordion is so much cooler.

Yes hello. I too am here for the Sex Show?

I met this scene of wanton carnage at a slapshod shack in the middle of nowhere. I’m guessing when the promised Sex Show turned out to be not so forthcoming, a gunfight broke out. The bartender is still alive though, and you can find him cowering behind furniture and begging for his life.

The Aurora’s Sleeper Car shitter!

During the trek across Irradiated Russia, your steam engine, The Aurora, starts to get a little crowded because of all the weirdos, loners and vagabonds you keep picking up. Thankfully, the gang meets a really nice mechanic, who isn’t even a mutant freak. As if that’s not miracle enough, he says there’s a sleeper car somewhere in the Volga territory. If you drive it back to the engine, he can even install it for you. Great.

Even better, it has a shitter. The colors are fucky because it was dark as all hell in there, but the hover image shows it with nightvision. When you first find the car, you have to eliminate all the guys who are abusing the shit out of it. They’re not taking care of the place, they’re really just squatting. As you can see, the facilities in this train car are in a sorry state. Don’t worry about the guy on the ground. He’s completely fine.

Once you triumphantly return with the train car, everyone works together to shine it up like a Hyrule powergem and look at the results! Glimmering chrome and a floor cleared of detritus! There’s also no bodies. I don’t know where he went, but I didn’t kill anyone during this playthrough, so maybe we simply dumped him out the back door. Who cares if the toilet paper on the wall-mounted dispenser is in the exact configuration in both the before and after? There’s a signed biker chick calender on the wall now, and you really can’t beat that, so please cut the crap and enjoy this beautiful bathroom, hero!

Ooookay guys. Roll a D20 for me.

It’s time for the 2019 Blue Bowl Awards!

Each year, the illustrious committee of experts at Gaming Thones, consisting of myself, likes to give a nod where it’s due to the best of the bowls. There were a lot of great potentials this year, but the clear winner for 2019 is the train depot shitter from Metro: Exodus. I’ll tell you what makes this shitter so outstanding:

1. It’s dreadful. Look at this fucking thing. Metro: Exodus is in the horror genre, and this shitter itself is a nightmare. There is no seat. It’s a metal basin that was probably originally intended for a urinal, with a concrete surround. It’s almost completely exposed to the elements, including radioactive snow that is currently falling right onto it.

2. It’s not clear where the thing drains to. Does it just empty out directly underneath the basin? Why would anyone use this? And clearly people do. Because there are several books and someone even left the lights on, implying they plan to return.

3. Metro: Exodus shows us the current demand for shitters is relevant. The game came out this year, and the presence of shitters of this design quality indicates not only that video game shitters are no passing trend, but that in time they may only improve.

Our second place winner is this prison shitter from Dishonored 2. As you know, I love me a good prison shitter. The tiny bucket in the corner is, for me, a joy to behold. That bucket says, “I know this is the last place on Earth you ever want to end up, and it’s probably the last place you’ll ever be. But I want you to know, I’m here for you.” When the going gets rough, a prison shitter is the one friend who will stay by your side, also because you aren’t allowed any contact with the outside world. You better appreciate a prison shitter. A terrific note on which we finish off 2019 - In gratitude, we thank our shitters, which provide comfort in even these terrible places.

The Baron’s golden shitter!

In the futuretimes of post-war, dystopian Russia, the Caspian Sea is no longer an enormous lake shaped like an upside-down baby. Instead, it’s a dried up desert region full of loot and booty that the local pirate goons scramble to claim. This alarmingly low-iq pirate community is led by The Baron: A bald, toothpick-chewing dirtbag who just wants to be Immortan Joe so badly. The Baron invites you up to his crow’s nest to toast whisky at gunpoint, and celebrate your newfound, compulsory alliance. But since I’m never agreeing to that, it all goes to shit and a shootout begins. I survived, and during the cutscene, I caught a brief glimpse of this incredible artifact. Yes, once again it’s an elevated cistern shitter! Gleaming like an idol of Ba’al, comfortably perched among richly patterned carpets and rugs. I think that’s also a gold-plated basin or something against the wall, but let’s be really real and just admit it’s spraypaint. Look at the tacky gold rams’ skulls. The Baron’s exquisite taste in only the finest bathroom fixtures trumps everything I thought I knew about home design.

Handmade Metro: Exodus themed brass 12.7mm bullet lighter.

Yamantau Bunker shitter!

This solitary toilet can be found cowering from abuse and disrepair at the vast bunker at Mt. Yamantau. The rollover image shows the exquisite detail afforded by the miracle of nightvision goggles! This is the only shitter on the level that I had access to, but I have to believe there are others in the unexplored areas. In addition to the grunts, this bunker was supposed to boast heads of state and the finest military minds, and I can’t believe they’d all be shitting together in harmony.

The Yamantau Cannibal Troupe are truly evil creatures. It’s terrible what they did to this room. That urinal doubles as a deadly weapon. If the cave troll from Moria came after you, you could actually use this urinal to defend yourself against it. I’d really love to know why I keep having to ask ‘where is the sink’, and I would vastly prefer if the alternative was our customary standard of sanitation. I cannot stress this enough: The bathroom is the staging ground for a multi-step process, and one of those steps is washing your god damn hands when you’re through!

At this point, I have to pause, because question marks have started percolating around my ears. In Metro: Exodus, the elevated cistern flushable toilet boasts significant popularity all across Russia, and it shows up in a lot of my screenshots. The design dates back to the era of Queen Elizabeth I (c. 1592). It’s certainly a conversation piece, and though some (who?) might deem it elegant, the presence of this ancient machine here at the Yamantau Bunker poses several issues. First, the issue of materials efficiency. If this thing breaks, where’s anyone going to find the obsolete valves and gaskets it needs? And actually maybe that’s why it looks this way, because there is actually no way to fix it. Second, there was extensive bombing in this region in the decades prior to our groups arrival (in fact, we passed a city-sized crater right before the main entrance came into view). The heaving of the ground, along with tremors, would have caused this tank to topple and smash, so it’s just not practical. Perhaps the entire machine was salvaged and installed by a scouting team after the bombing ceased, but I find that to be the most unlikely possibility of all. They would have had to find this object somewhere in Russia, but it probably wouldn’t have even been in a museum because by the time most households in the region had indoor plumbing the design had changed. These anachronisms have me wondering if Artyom snorted a little too much of that blue-green mold, and now he’s got a case of the Fantasies.

Hansa Train Depot shitter!

While still in the beginning of the game, at some point Anna (the protagonist’s wife) gets kidnapped by a group called Hansa. I kinda fought back, and maybe might have been shot and left for dead in a culvert. But, I found a medkit on a corpse, dusted it off, patched meself up good as new, and broke in to where Hansa was keeping Anna - A train depot, with tons of armed guards. God damn it, Anna, I loves ya, but you’re really a lot of work.

Upon rescuing Anna, a stealth mission begins, and you can’t even save during it, so it’s a great challenge. I found this shitter near the beginning of the level, so it’s almost like they give you the reward before you do the mission. This is a Минстрой-approved sanitation device, with a proper seat. It doesn’t even look cobbled together. This is some pre-war shit! Even if it doesn’t have a door, it is still somewhat sheltered from the elements due to the surrounding crates and concrete slabs. The candle and reading materials give it a reminiscent wink of comfort. I’m sure that book is left open because it’s impossible to fumble with the pages in subzero temperatures.

This shitter is a contender for the esteemed Blue Bowl of 2019.

Fanatics Church shitters!

Metro: Exodus is a post-apocalyptic, open-world stealth FPS, with shitters. For me, that is the golden ratio. It is like receiving a card in the mail full of hundreds. Set in Russia, this game was released in the early part of 2019, but I’m just getting around to it now, and boy howdy, this game is a goldmine of shitters.

Here are two shitters you find when you visit the Church of the Fanatics. It’s right as you first enter the Volga territory. Led by Father Silantius, the congregation first welcomes you by clanging a bell, waving enthusiastically, and cheering at you. “Come on in my brother, and receive our blessings!” So you know right away things are about to get freaky. Say what you will about homicidal psychotics, but these folks are OK in my book because look at these shitters. I’m the non-lethal type anyway when it comes to these games, so it worked out.

First time you find a shitter at the Fanatics church, it’s in the belfry. This one belongs to Katya and her daughter, civilians who warn you about the Fanatics hostile intentions. A simple bucket, tucked into an alcove, with a curtain for privacy. прекрасный!

The second shitter is downstairs in the main area of the church. It’s a proper bench-style, with a little candle, some books, and a sink outside for washing up after. In terms of post-apocalyptic sanitation, this is true luxury. I would say this is the высший shitter, and the amentities here are almost enough to make you wanna join the Fanatics! I chose non-lethal takedown of everyone present, but I’m thinking of coming back some day and settling down here. This is a four-bedroom, two-bath lakefront property with no mortgage, filled to the gills with glass jars of weird preserved carrots and stuff. дом, милый дом наконец!