PlayerUnknown’s Prologue: Dive into the mesmerizing world of Wayback, an enchanting exploration simulation set in a sea of metaverse magic

Buried in Brendan Greene and PlayerUnknown Productions’ billowing, three-part, decade-long effort to build some kind of “3D internet” there is a ramshackle but thoughtful Unreal Engine game about wilderness survival and orienteering. Catchily titled Prologue: Go Wayback! and due for Early Access launch this spring, it’s a game about finding a radio tower on a 64km2 map, generated based on a mix of in-house art and public access landscape data fed through the developer’s in-house machine learning technology.

I had a chance to try a WIP build earlier this month, and came away quite beguiled. The trouble is, whatever pleasure Go Wayback has to offer floats on the rapids of an alternately incoherent and obnoxious desire to create a platter of connected gameworlds based on machine learning, which Greene – once the developer of pioneering battle royale PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – variously and giddily compares to Steam, Ready Player One, holodecks, Rust and Minecraft.