Brendan Greene's Open-world Survival Roguelike Hikes Into Early...

The launch version also brings extra game modes and a map editor.

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.

Normally generative AI use is a huge no from me, but PP's systems are built in-house, created using publicly available data and used only to generate the game's hyper-realistic terrain, which is then supplemented by more traditional procgen systems and 3D art. I remain sceptical about the functional benefits the ML tech brings, but it's a more nuanced use-case than a studio trying to replace human workers with ChatGPT or whatever.

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

Source: PC Gamer