Prologue focuses on extreme weather and rejects survival clichés

Unlike most games of its genre, Prologue: Go Wayback aims to change the basic logic of survival titles. Developed by PlayerUnknown Productions, the new studio of Brendan Greene — creator of PUBG — the game abandons the excessive reliance on mechanics like hunger, thirst, and cutting down trees with bare hands. The intention is to create a brutal and realistic experience, but less cartoonish.

According to the developers, the priority will be to survive extreme weather, not hunger. In an interview with the Epic Games Store, the creative director Scott Davidson — former developer of Rust — explained the change in focus:

"We want to prioritize temperature as a metric. Rarely do you die of dehydration in real survival situations. Very rarely do you die of malnutrition, because it takes days to burn off all the calories you still have in your body."

During testing sessions held earlier this year, journalists reported that dying of hunger was rare. However, cold — represented by temperature mechanics that directly affect the character's performance — caused repeated deaths. The proposal, according to Davidson, is to create "the most challenging survival game possible," but with internal logic more faithful to reality.

However, hunger and thirst meters do not disappear:

"They still play an important role," explains Davidson. "As they drop, your ability to regulate body temperature decreases. And then, yes, you freeze faster."

Another common trope of the genre was also discarded: cutting down trees with improvised tools or bare hands. Prologue seeks a more realistic tone and does not want to repeat the formula of games like Minecraft or Rust.

"Have you ever tried to cut down a tree? It's really, really hard," commented Davidson, criticizing the artificiality of the process in traditional games.

This is not Brendan Greene's first attempt to break away from the mold of PUBG and explore more ambitious ideas. The studio's previous project, Prologue (original title before the revamp), was announced in 2019 as a technical experience with procedurally generated open world. Now, with the subtitle Go Wayback, the focus remains on realism and extreme challenge, but with more refined mechanics.

Prologue: Go Wayback does not have a set release date yet, but its proposal already positions it as a title that attempts to break away from repetitive conventions of the survival genre. The expectation now revolves around how the public will react to the absence of certain classic elements — and the arrival of others, less predictable, like deadly weather.