From Press Release:
AMSTERDAM (Nov. 20, 2025) – Prologue: Go Wayback!, the emergent open world survival game from independent studio PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions, is now live in Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Jump in now to the studio’s ambitious single-player run-based adventure for $19.99/€19.99.
Get a glimpse of what awaits in the wilderness in today’s stunning new Early Access Launch Trailer: https://youtu.be/YLdm77g5F2M
In Prologue: Go Wayback!, a different and challenging 64km2 world awaits with every run. Using hand-created art fused with proprietary machine-learning technology to generate realistic terrain at scale, Prologue: Go Wayback! offers 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, and community engagement is at the heart of PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions. The studio has worked with the community via playtests and an open beta to improve the emergent survival experience, and today’s Early Access launch brings several new modes and customization features to players:
- 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.
The studio has also released its Early Access roadmap with planned updates for deeper gameplay and survival systems, enhanced natural environments, new weather types, and more ways to play and further customize the game to empower player choice.
Read the full Early Access roadmap dev blog for more information: https://go.pp.studio/
Prologue: Go Wayback! 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.
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 / Instagram / X / TikTok / YouTube
Store Pages: Steam / Epic Games Store
# # #
