PUBG creator's wilderness survival game actually draws inspiration from an unexpected place - a whole raft of zombie games like DayZ, Project Zomboid, and Left 4 Dead

PlayerUnknown Productions is the home of the titular PlayerUnknown of PUBG fame, but the studio is taking a decidedly different direction with its next project. Prologue: Go Wayback is an open-world survival game that aims to be unapologetic in its brutality as you navigate your way through the wilderness. While the likes of Minecraft will have depleting health to alert you that you’ve not eaten, neglecting your body's needs in Prologue will result in your run coming to an end as your character succumbs to hunger. So much so that the developers have said they "try not to say 'fun.'"

However, despite a wilderness survival game evoking images of Minecraft, Rust, and Valheim, PlayerUnknown Productions actually found more inspiration in the shambling corpses of the undead. Games like DayZ, Project Zomboid, and even Left 4 Dead turned out to be bigger inspirations for the game, which probably says more about how brutal Prologue is set to be than I can.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, Prologue’s creative director, Scott Davidson, shared some tidbits from the early development of the game. "At the start, we selected a bunch of games, and then we played them. We had DayZ, and then we talked extensively about the things we liked about DayZ. We played Minecraft for a while, we played Project Zomboid. Mostly multiplayer games, because we're a single-player game, but we wanted to be able to be in it together and talk about it while we were doing it."

The harsh survival elements of Project Zomboid and DayZ are natural inspirations for the genre (and a bit of a full-circle moment, as PlayerUnknown’s first project was a Battle Royale mod for DayZ). However, the arcade-like gameplay of Left 4 Dead is a bit out there when you think of typical survival games.

However, senior character artist Hakan Kamar shed some light, saying, "when I think of 'what's Prologue?' I try to zoom out a little bit. It's basically going from cabin to cabin until you get to the end. And that gameplay, weirdly enough, reminds me a lot about Left 4 Dead, which is basically from one safe house, a bunch of stuff happens in-between, and then you get to the next safehouse." Which, when you put it like that, makes total sense.

Unless you’re in the playtest, you won’t be able to get your hands on Prologue for a while yet, so why not check out our list of the best survival games you can play right now?