Building a fire in a survival game is an important early-game milestone: it lets you stay warm and toasty even when the temperature drops, and you can start cooking basic meals instead of just stuffing berries into your face. At night you can see a few feet around your fire without having to hold a torch, and even more importantly, you can spot your campsite from a distance while blundering around in the dark.
Since a campfire is critical to getting through the opening hours of a survival game, most games make it a pretty simple task. Grab some sticks and some rocks. Craft a campfire in your inventory. Plop it down and turn it on. Now you've got a light source, a heat source, a basic kitchen, and a homing beacon.
But imagine being alone in the wilderness, hungry, cold, and tired, and you've just sparked your first life-saving campfire. It should be a huge relief. It should be a moment of excitement.
Campfire crafting is pretty routine in most games, but in Prologue: Go Wayback!, the early access survival game from PlayerUnknown Productions that just went into open beta, it feels like a real accomplishment. Part of the reason is that it's not handled with a crafting system at all. Just physics.
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You begin each game of Prologue in a small cabin, with the goal being to reach a weather station on the other side of a procedurally generated 64x64km wilderness map. With only four slots for items and a tiny backpack, there's only a few things you can take with you as you scour the cabin for your journey: a compass, a map, a few cans of food, maybe a tool like a hammer. Plus you'll need a ferro rod and knife, which when scraped together, make sparks.
But you can't just use your ferro rod on a hunk of wood and get instant ignition. You'll need some tinder, like crumpled up paper or dry cardboard, something that will ignite and burn away quickly. You'll also need kindling, dry sticks and twigs that catch on fire and spread easily, and then firewood, dry logs that will burn for a good long while.
The system in Prologue is a bit clunky—it's a beta, after all—but instead of crafting your fire on an inventory screen you place each element on the ground in front of you. You can collect items like twigs and logs without storing them in your inventory, in an "under your arm" slot, as if you're just sort of holding them. Then you place them or drop them one by one in a pile. Place your tinder, your kindling, and your fuel, then strike your ferro rod while aiming at your tinder, and baby, you've got a stew fire going! Hopefully.
In a fireplace in a cabin, it's not hard to get the fire started, but out in the woods where it might be windy or raining or even hailing, it's going to be much more challenging. Once I'd left my starter cabin and blundered off into the woods, I quickly wound up cold and wet and terribly lost. As darkness fell, I chanced upon what I think was a small chicken coop: a little wooden structure I had to crouch down to get inside.
I'd taken some cardboard and wadded up paper with me, and the coop had a couple dry cords of wood and a few thin sticks I used to place on top of them. I scraped my ferro rod a few times, the paper caught fire, and then it slowly spread to the sticks and then the logs. Outside the wind howled and the rain fell, but I had my own cozy and warm little coop in the wild. That's what I mean by satisfying.
In the next cabin I came across, still in a downpour, I made another fire in the fireplace, and since my clothes were soaked I thought I'd strip them off and lay them near the fire to see if that would dry them. Sure enough, it did. It's always nice when you have a logical thought and the game's systems support it.
That was about the end of my luck in that run, however, because I never stumbled onto another cabin after that and I pretty quickly starved to death while running around looking for one. My next run was even tougher because I actually dropped my ferro rod at some point, probably while trying to sort out my tiny little inventory.
But I still managed to make a fire! The next cabin I found had a working generator, so I turned on all four electric stove top elements in the kitchen and dropped my kindling and firewood on top of them. Not quite as cozy as a fireplace, but the red-hot stove started the logs burning and it worked just fine to warm me up and dry my clothes.
I had another problem, though: when I took off my pants and underwear they vanished. I had to leave the cabin and run through the woods like Winnie The Pooh: clothes up top but swinging free down below. Not a great look, and not great for a world frequently hit by blizzards. I found a replacement pair of pants later, but I also slid down an icy cliffside into a crevasse I couldn't climb out of.
I haven't played a whole lot of Prologue: Go Wayback! yet, and the beta currently feels pretty bare—like me after losing my pants. It's mostly long, long, long stretches of just walking through the woods, and the only place I've found food or supplies are the cabins scattered around the map (there are mushrooms but I'm not brave enough to eat them), so it doesn't really feel like you're surviving the wild as much as it does capitalizing off the tiny zones of civilization. (I did drink from a river and a mud puddle but both made me quite sick.)
I'm curious to see what more is added during the beta period and for its early access launch later this year. Hopefully, the rest of the survival systems will feel as satisfying as making a fire does.
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