PUBG creator's brutal new survival game surprise drops into Steam Early Access with a roadmap promising "expanded construction," cooking, and equipment degradation

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PlayerUnknown Production's next step toward Project Artemis

Prologue: Go Wayback first-person screenshot of a man holding a compass in a snowy forest
(Image credit: Playerunknown Productions)

PUBG's very own PlayerUnknown, Brendan Greene, has finally released his merciless survival game Prologue: Go Wayback! into Early Access.

PlayerUnknown Productions has stealthily unleashed its open-world survival game onto the world with a new trailer, which you can see down below. The basic pitch is that you're dropped into a procgen map with the goal of getting to a weather station the old-fashioned way, without succumbing to brutal weather or your rumbling belly along the way. There are no map markers or guiding voice on the radio; just a diegetic map and compass, plus your wits.

Prologue: Go Wayback! - Early Access Launch Trailer - YouTube Prologue: Go Wayback! - Early Access Launch Trailer - YouTube
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Alongside the Early Access launch on Steam and the Epic Games Store, the studio also released a roadmap of what to expect before 1.0. Among the list are "updates that add realism, scale, and cohesion to the world," such as improved trails, enhanced rivers with sources and such, more varied biomes, different weather states, and most interesting to me, "water that freezes and thaws with weather and seasons."

More typical survive-o-crafty bits are also in the pipeline: stuff like clothing degradation, containers for food or fuel, a full-on climbing system for vertical traversal, improved cooking, and "expanded construction... that uses found materials with full freedom of expression." General updates are in the works, too, which should bring full controller support, a photo mode, and new modes. You can see the full roadmap here.

Prologue: Go Wayback! is also our first taste of Brendan Greene's Project Artemis, the Earth-scale simulation that he's been cooking up for years. You know, the one that he called "realistic Minecraft," which is supposed to let players loose to make whatever they want in a grand, procedurally generated world built off Prologue's tech.

"I want everyone to be able to create massive worlds," Greene told GamesRadar+ during a studio visit earlier this year. "I hope someday that you'll have our survival world, our 'chill' world, but then you also have a Ubisoft world or a Sony world or a Microsoft world."

Will Prologue have what it takes to trek onto our best survival games list?

Kaan Serin
Freelance contributor

Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.

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