“You can’t charge money for this.” The open-world survival game from the creator of Steam’s biggest hit has turned out to be a huge letdown

Prologue: Go Wayback! was hyped up as a big new release from PLAYERUNKNOWN (the creator of PUBG: Battlegrounds), but it didn’t exactly land the way people expected. The single-player survival game launched yesterday and didn’t reach even 200 concurrent players on Steam. Its early reception isn’t very encouraging either, with only around 60% of reviews being positive.

Prologue: Go Wayback! launches with mixed reviews

Prologue: Go Wayback! launched in Early Access, but a lot of players feel it doesn’t deserve even that label yet, they say it’s more like a playtest or a tech demo. The game’s balance is still rough: you rely on resources from the very beginning, but sometimes you find plenty and other times the run is basically doomed because nothing spawns. The RNG clearly needs improvement to make the experience more consistently playable. It’s meant to be challenging as a survival game, but at the moment it comes across as more unbalanced than intentionally difficult.

As someone commented on Steam:

And yes, Prologue: Go Wayback! is the first step toward the developers’ long-term vision, Project Artemis game – a massive online sandbox world that’s their ultimate goal. Right now, it almost feels like they’re mainly testing their new engine, Melba, which is being built for those future games.

One interesting part is their AI-generated content disclosure on Steam: the studio created its own machine-learning model, trained only on vetted open-source data, to produce the base terrain in Unreal Engine 5. Their artists then use it to build natural-looking 64 km2 maps with procedural elements like trees, rivers, and rocks. Every time you start a run, the game generates a fresh map offline on your system.

Source: PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions

Their Early Access roadmap looks promising, but to pull it all off, they’ll need a solid player base from the start. Community feedback is always a huge help for developers, especially when a game still has some rough edges. We’ve seen plenty of redemption stories in gaming. No Man’s Sky was once criticized as empty and disappointing, but almost a decade later it’s considered one of the best sandbox games. The same goes for single-player titles like Cyberpunk 2077, which had serious optimization issues at launch but has bounced back, with players still engaged and looking forward to the sequel. But with Prologue: Go Wayback! things don’t look quite as hopeful.

Prologue: Go Wayback!

November 20, 2025

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• Overview

• survival sandbox
• PlayerUnknown (Brendan Greene)