Brendan Greene, the creator of battle royale mega-hit PUBG, better known by his alias PlayerUnknown, is about to release a new game. It’s called Prologue: Go Wayback! and it’s launching in early access on 20th November, and it’s the first game by his new studio PlayerUnknown Productions. It’s also not the kind of game you’re probably expecting it to be.
Prologue: Go Wayback! has no combat in it at all. Instead, it’s a game based purely around survival – around orienteering through forests and braving often ferocious elements. The particularly exciting thing here is the tech: every level you play is procedurally generated, and everything that happens while you’re playing is procedurally generated too.
The game is actually the first step in realising an enormously ambitious masterplan of procedurally generated worlds – entire worlds. Prologue is, in a sense, the terrain-level realisation of that. But it is also a game to be played – it’s not solely a technical demonstration.
In the game, you need to read paper maps and a compass to navigate across forested terrain in all manner of adverse weather conditions. You’ll move from the relative safety of wooded cabins while trying not to get caught in blizzards and torrential rain, all while managing hunger and thirst, and your personal warmth. Let yourself get too cold and you’ll get hypothermia, as I once did in the game, and you’ll die. Let yourself get too wet and you’ll need to dry-off or get cold and die, while also potentially getting stuck in dynamically created swamp land.
You’ll have to deal with fuse boxes, generators, wood fires, stove pots and cooking, clothing, and even hammer and nails as you reboard weather-beaten cabins before they let too much punishing cold air in. There are a lot of systems in play and more are being added all of the time; this is an early access release.
And I was struck while playing it how daunting the weather can be. That’s something we know well from exploring in real-life of course, but games only ever feature weather as a backdrop, really. Here, though, weather is in the foreground – it is the only source of threat in the game, which strikes me as very bold creative vision for a game in 2025. I admire it a lot.
I also admire the big idea powering the project, of grand procedural generation, because it’s the kind of shoot-for-the-stars concept that can be so exciting to get caught up in. And let me tell you: Brendan Greene’s big idea really is colossal, and I know this because I spent an hour talking to him about it recently. Expect more soon, as soon as I can write it.
