From Press Release:
AMSTERDAM (Oct. 28, 2025) – Independent studio PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions’ first game, Prologue: Go Wayback!, invites players into a gorgeous and daunting wilderness on Nov. 20 as the studio’s ambitious single-player run-based emergent survival game leaves open beta and enters Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store ($19.99, €19.99).
Start your journey with today’s Early Access Announce Trailer, which showcases several new features coming to the game’s Early Access debut that offer players more variety and greater control over the conditions faced while trying to complete their run: https://youtu.be/zuQvsF_qovw
In Prologue: Go Wayback!, a different and challenging 64km2 world awaits with every run. Using hand-created art fused with proprietary machine-learning technology, Prologue: Go Wayback! gives players billions of beautiful and challenging worlds to explore and overcome. Your decisions and a few key items are all you have to survive a new wilderness every time you play. Stay warm, forage for food, seek drinkable water and chart your path from shelter to shelter as you brave dynamic weather on your path to the Weather Tower – this is your story.
Prologue: Go Wayback! is designed for players to create their own experiences. Community engagement is at the heart of PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions; the studio plans to develop new features with community feedback, and forge new tools for players to create new journeys as the game moves through Early Access.
Based on community feedback from the ongoing Open Beta, various new game modes and settings will be available at Early Access launch, including:
- Custom Game Settings: Set the weather, time of day, world temperature, and customize gameplay settings to decide how easy or hard your odds of survival will be.
- Game Modes: Play the default “Go Wayback!” mode and chart your path to the Weather Tower. Challenge yourself in “Objective: Survive” and try to endure with limited resources for as long as possible, or take it easy with “Free Roam” mode, where the only risk of death is falling down a cliff.
- Map Editor: Draw your own map design, or import an image into the in-game Map Editor, and let the game generate a custom world for you to explore.
Together with the community, PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions plans to add new Game Modes, more Custom Game Settings, and more features for increased player customization and deeper gameplay throughout Early Access.
Key Features
- A New Map Every Time You Play: Explore vast, beautiful landscapes generated through an in-house machine learning algorithm guided by artists.
- Dynamic Weather System: Face drenching rains, freezing blizzards and rampaging thunderstorms across an environment where the weather can change at a moment’s notice.
- Emergent Player Freedom: No quest markers, no scripted path and nobody to tell you how to play. What you do is up to you.
- Realistic Navigation: Use a compass, a map, natural landmarks and your survival skills. Learn to chart your path and navigate nature on a journey uniquely yours.
- A World To Get Lost In: Breathtaking landscapes are everywhere – from picturesque rivers to cliff bluffs and the golden rays at sunset, you won’t regret stopping to enjoy the view.
Players are invited to jump into the Open Beta of Prologue: Go Wayback!, which today received its fourth update, adding new flashlights for survival variety at night and visual improvements to the river generation system. Game Modes are also available for beta testing with today’s update. Join the journey early and share your feedback on Discord.
Another step towards Project Artemis
The Early Access release of Prologue: Go Wayback! marks a significant step forward in the development of Project Artemis, PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions’ long-term mission to create and deliver a technology and platform that enables creation and emergent play at a massive scale.
To produce the technology to power Project Artemis, the independent studio is developing its own in-house Melba engine, which can be explored in the continuously updated playable tech demo, Preface: Undiscovered World.
As the first of three planned titles, Prologue: Go Wayback! is designed to be a standalone single-player game experience built around the studio’s technological progress to create realistic terrain generation at scale. Prologue: Go Wayback! is powered by the studio’s research into machine learning (ML) models to generate base terrain maps in Unreal Engine 5, which are then populated procedurally with custom assets such as trees, rivers, rocks, cliffs, hills and shelters.
A proprietary machine-learning model generates 64km2 maps that appear both natural and realistic, and is trained on publicly available open-source terrain data and vetted to prevent the use of any copyrighted material.
Become a part of the journey:
- Discord: https://discord.com/invite/
playerunknownproductions - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pp_
socials - X: https://x.com/playprologue
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@
playprologue/ - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@
PLAYERUNKNOWNProductions
Store Pages:
- Steam: https://store.steampowered.
com/app/2943740/Prologue_Go_ Wayback/ - Epic Games Store: https://store.epicgames.com/
en-US/p/prologue-go-wayback- 72ee27
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