Screenshots
Watch trailer on Steam ↗Prologue: Go Wayback!
PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions · Published by PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions · Official site ↗
Mixed — 62% positive (767 reviews) · 22 achievements
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
Prologue: Go Wayback! is a single-player open-world emergent survival roguelike where every journey is unique. Traverse a new wilderness that is generated for you every time you play. Chart your path, overcome the elements, and write your own story of exploration.
Adventure, Indie, Simulation, Free To Play · 2026 · More free games
Embark on unique adventures in Prologue: Go Wayback!, an open-world emergent survival experience where each journey through the wilderness is crafted anew.
About this game
Explore a new world every time you play
In Prologue: Go Wayback! no two journeys are ever the same.
A brand new 64km2 world is generated on your PC every time you start the game. Our in-house machine-learning technology empowers our artists and designers to create a system that lets you generate billions of beautiful, natural worlds that are waiting to be explored.
Chart your own course through the rugged terrain toward the distant Weather Tower. How you get there, and whether you survive, is entirely up to you.
Embark on an adventure to overcome the wilderness
Dynamic weather and time of day shape your every decision.
Rain can soak your clothes and drench your fires. Thunderstorms can wreak havoc on the terrain. Blizzards bring snow and the danger of hypothermia.
Forage for edible food, seek sources of drinkable water, and chart your path from shelter to shelter.
Your choices, your world, your story
No guides. No markers telling you where to go next. Just your instincts, your tools, and your choices.
You will need to read your map, use your compass, keep an eye on the sky, and adapt to the terrain and the weather if you want to survive.
Will you stick to the valleys, searching for shelter? Or climb the ridges for a clear line to the Weather Tower? Will you brave the storm at night, or hunker down and wait it out?
Your story is what you make it.
Key Features
A new map every time you play
Explore vast, procedurally generated landscapes created through the fusion of our in-house machine learning technology and human talent.
Survive against the elements
Manage your body temperature, thirst, and hunger while battling rain, wind, snow, and freezing temperatures. The weather can change at any moment.
Emergent player freedom
No quest markers, no scripted path. How you play and what you do is up to you.
Realistic navigation
Use a compass, a map, and your gut feeling. With no mini map to tell you where to go, every step is a test of your awareness and orientation.
Define your next run
Design your own map, choose a game mode, and select custom game settings to create your own unique run.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel Core i5 8600
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1070
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 10 GB available space
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel Core i5-10600k
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia RTX 2080/3070
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 10 GB available space
Supported Languages
*languages with full audio support
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
Small bug fix
We are seeing some rare crashes when generating terrain in the GPU, as mitigation step the game will detect if a crash happens and force CPU generation automatically on future runs. The terrain generation method can be controlled in Settings --> Gameplay, 'Auto' will autodetect if the GPU can be used, and 'CPU' will force the generation to happen in the CPU (slower but more stable).Read full article on Community Announcements (pp_dmerayo)AnnouncementsOfficial
Prologue: Go Wayback! is now free to own
Dear community,Today brings the final update to Prologue: Go Wayback! that our studio's game team has been working on. We announced recently that we unfortunately have had to make some hard decisions for the studio's future, and this included halting development on the game. The studio will continue in a smaller size to keep developing its core technology, Melba. Our work on Melba has helped us with how we generate realistic terrain in Go Wayback! but it has always been a separate project from the game. You can continue to follow our progress on developing Melba in our tech demo Preface: Undiscovered World.We are proud of the work our team did on Go Wayback!, and we are immensely grateful to the players who helped playtest the game through our betas and offered feedback during Early Access. We were not always able to be as visibly present everywhere as much as we would have liked, but we read all your feedback, comments, and requests across Steam, social media, and Discord.What now?Go Wayback! is now available for free for any player to claim and own. We also just released the game out of Early Access, because it felt inappropriate to leave it in Early Access when we are not able to continue developing it. This wasn't the plan we had for a full release when we started with Early Access, but we felt this would be the best way to leave the game available on Steam without setting the wrong expectations from future store page visitors and players.Developer BuildYou can now also access our developer build via the Game Versions menu in the Steam Library. (Right click on Prologue: Go Wayback! in your Library -> Properties -> Game Versions & Betas). This developer build is similar to the live build of the game, but has a developer menu that you can pull up by pressing the "=" key. With these dev options you can spawn items, change the time of day and the weather, fly across the map or teleport to a location, and much more.Can I mod the game?Go Wayback! is made in Unreal Eng...Read full article on Community Announcements (pp_profpew)Press Coverage
Development on Prologue: Go Wayback is ending as PlayerUnknown Productions lays off an unspecified amount of staff
I guess we're not going to find out what comes after the prologue after all. By that I mean, some bad news came out of PlayerUnknown Productions yesterday. The studio shared a statement on their Dwitter account to share that development on Prologue: Go Wayback is ending, as PlayerUnknown himself Brendan Greene says that he has "reached the limits of how far I can continue to fund this journey in its current form." Read moreRead full article on Rock, Paper, ShotgunPatch NotesOfficial
An update from the studio
Hey everyone. We have some sad news to share. Unfortunately we have had to make a hard decision to restructure our studio to a smaller team. As a result, we will be halting further development of Prologue: Go Wayback.Our main priority at the moment is to support our employees during this difficult transition.While we hope the studio can return to Go Wayback at a future point in time, right now it means we will be unable to complete our Early Access plans for the game.We are currently working on an update that we plan to release soon, which will add new items as well as paths and trails to the game for enhanced exploration.With that update, we also intend to release the game out of Early Access and make it free for any players who want to check it out in the future. We are also investigating offering refunds to players who have purchased the game.Please stand by for more information on this over the coming weeks, which we will communicate here on Steam and on our Discord.Read full article on Community Announcements (pp_profpew)Patch NotesOfficial
Hotfix - v0.26010
We have just released a small update for Prologue: Go Wayback! with the following fixes:Renamed Tetris Master Achievement to Puzzle Master and fixed the unlock criteria.Fixed storms that occur during sleep not counting toward Thor Hates Me Achievement completion.Fixed cases where the northeast corner of the map was counted incorrectly for the Long Way Round Achievement.Removed hiking backpack from the list of allowed backpacks for The Swiss Commute Achievement.Fixed the Share button not working properly in some instances.Fixed two rare crashes.Increased the spawn rate of kibbles and added a new type.Read full article on Community Announcements (pp_blablah)
