Prologue: Go Wayback!, the ultra-hard hiking sim developed by Brendan Greene's studio PlayerUnknown Productions, has technically been playable for a while now. The studio has been running an open beta for the last two and a half months, giving players curious about Greene's first proper game since PUBG: Battlegrounds the chance to try it out. That testing phase is rapidly approaching its end, however, as PP has announced its survival roguelike will arrive in early access on November 20.
For the uninitiated, Prologue: Go Wayback is a deceptively simple game about hiking from a cabin in the woods to a distant weather tower, where each run is completely unique thanks to maps generated by the studio's homebrewed machine-learning technology.
As for the game itself, hiking to a weather tower may sound straightforward, but the rough terrain combined with the inclement, volatile weather can quickly spell doom for the unprepared hiker. I barely made it more than a few hundred yards when I played the alpha build earlier this year, alternately freezing and falling to my death across multiple runs, while Elie Gould described it as one of the hardest survival games they've ever played.
While PlayerUnknown Productions has been steadily updating Prologue through the year, tweaking its weather systems and adding extra bits of survival kit like binoculars, lighters, and matchbooks, the early access version will introduce a few more substantial features. Primarily, it adds two extra game modes alongside the standard race to the weather tower. Objective: Survive removes the journeying aspect of Go Wayback, simply challenging you to stay alive, while Free Roam removes all the game's hazards and lets you enjoy the atmosphere of Go Wayback's forest.
In addition, the early access version will chuck in a map editor to let you create your own challenges, as well as map seed sharing, so you can show off maps you like to other players. Finally, it adds the ability to save your game mid run. The idea of saving being a big deal might seem odd, but it sounds like PP has run into the common problem of its ML systems suffering from short-term memory loss:
"Saving has been trickier than you'd think, as our guided generation system means things don't end up at the same place every time," PlayerUnknown Productions admits. "We are doing some final testing on our save system ahead of rolling it out with [the] early access launch."
It'll be interesting to see how Prologue is received, given it's meant to be the first (or arguably second) step in Greene's 10-year plan to build a planet-sized game, or more specifically, a creative platform that can support planet-sized games. Some might call it a Metaverse, though Greene himself doesn't like that term.
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