{"id":1377338,"date":"2025-11-01T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gD9PwNjFKdoo6ThnUuKtRP"},"modified":"2025-11-01T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T12:00:00","slug":"brendan-greenes-open-world-survival-roguelike-hikes-into-early-access-later-this-month-and-itll-actually-let-you-save-your-run-through-its-brutal-wilderness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/brendan-greenes-open-world-survival-roguelike-hikes-into-early-access-later-this-month-and-itll-actually-let-you-save-your-run-through-its-brutal-wilderness\/","title":{"rendered":"Brendan Greene’s open-world survival roguelike hikes into early access later this month, and it’ll actually let you save your run through its brutal wilderness"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Prologue: Go Wayback!<\/a>, 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<\/a> for the last two and a half months, giving players curious about Greene’s first proper game since PUBG: Battlegrounds<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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