The hardest part of survival games is, well, the survival. As someone with an impressive talent for attaining random injuries and bizarre illnesses, there's a reason that I'm a games journalist and not an intrepid outdoor specialist. I prefer to explore in virtual safety, and while my library only really includes more fantastical experiences like Runescape: Dragonwilds and Valheim, I'd be lying if I said Prologue: Go Wayback doesn't intrigue me. Promising an ever-changing, gritty survival adventure that will eventually expand to include "millions" of procedurally generated worlds, PUBG's Brendan Greene has set the bar high, and now we'll finally get a chance to experience it for ourselves.
So what exactly is survival game, it's actually one of three stepping stones ahead of Project Artemis, a mysterious, colossal metaverse-style experience that claims to be a "fully emergent digital world at a planetary scale." Wayback, alongside its sister titles, will be completely standalone, and it's specifically aimed at testing the company's terrain generation technology ahead of Artemis.
Details aside, the actual premise of Wayback sounds simple: there's a huge weather tower, and you have to reach it. In reality, however, it's a lot more complicated. As my colleague Jamie found out the hard way, Wayback thrusts you into an unforgiving, sprawling world with nothing but the clothes on your back (if there even are any), a limited inventory, and constantly blinking hunger and thirst meters. The weather can change on a whim, freak accidents can set you back just long enough to decimate your water supply, and all you have to keep you safe are scattered wooden cabins that probably won't be as close as they look initially.
If you think you've mapped all of these out on your first run, however, you're wrong. Wayback creates a new 8km x 8km map every time you load in, relocating the cabins, and transforming once rocky outcrops into vicious, bone-crushing rapids. Terrain will change depending on the weather, flooding once-idyllic plains with mud, impeding your progress. In Wayback, the world is literally out to kill you.
A brand-new demo for Prologue: Go Wayback is available on Steam right now, offering four unique maps with very different, challenging locations. You can see if you can outlast Jamie right here.
In the meantime, however, we have a list of all the best crafting games is combining disparate things into something useful is more up your alley.
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