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Prologue: Go Wayback! is probably one of the hardest survival games I’ve played in a while, but don’t let the supposed difficulty put you off giving the survival roguelike a go. Because if the playtests revealed anything, it’s that anything’s possible when you have a pocket full of blackberries and access to a heat source.
“You just have to think outside the box,” senior artist Hakan Kamar tells me. “But people are smart. I think they understand how to do that.” Bold of you to assume I know where the box is, but I will say even I demonstrated a few moments of ingenuity while playing Prologue. At one point, I was outside in the middle of the night with no light source (I had accidentally dropped my torch and couldn’t find it). But instead of just giving up and waiting until I froze to death, I equipped my ferrous rod and started striking the tool to make embers. These small sparks managed to provide just enough light for me to find my torch and then go on my merry way.
Due to the limited carry space that your initial backpack provides, you’ll often have to make tough decisions about what you take and what you leave behind. So when you realise that you’ve left something quite important behind, it’s good to know that you can at least get creative when times get tough.
“This guy didn’t find a ferrous rod, so he couldn’t make a fire,” lead designer Scott Davidson says. “But he worked out that he could turn the hob on the oven, where the pan is, and if you put a log on top of it, the log would catch fire because the hob is a heat source. We’re not gonna ever tell people what to do, but it’s the rules of the world, like, this is a heat source—therefore, it will heat things.”
These helpful tricks and tips also mean that some players can find little cheat codes and shortcuts to surviving in Prologue. “We had a playtest meta, which basically amounted to finding a jerrycan with gasoline in it and finding a lot of blackberries,” Kamar says. “So you’d have a backpack full of berries and a jerrycan full of gasoline, which you could chug because we didn’t distinguish between water and gasoline. So you’d just chug the gasoline, run to the mountain, stuff your face with berries, and keep running.”
Unfortunately, you can’t chug gasoline anymore—that’s been patched out, but blackberries are still just as powerful. Despite only taking up one little chunk in your backpack, they’re one of the most nutrient-dense foods that you can find in Prologue. You get 100 calories per blackberry, while an apple will only give you 60. So, if you ever find yourself near a blackberry bush, always strip it of its resources before you carry on your travels—it could save you from starvation.
“The first run where I succeeded was me just kind of running as fast as I could, seeing some blackberry bushes, picking some blackberries, and running again,” Davidson says. “And I managed to do it just on blackberries. I talked to the artists who’d put that feature in and got it working—I was like, ‘You saved me, man—that feature saved me.'”
Berries may be powerful now, but that may not last. A lot of these features are a byproduct of the devs trying to find the line between punishing and playable. “It’s definitely going to be super difficult for us to actually balance [Prologue] in a way where we feel like it’s complete,” Kamar says. “Because we can make the game super easy to us, but that still might be a bit difficult for a first-time player, and then it would be trivial for a tenth-time player.”
Thanks to its replayability, the developers have an interesting issue where they need to make it approachable enough for new players to handle while also making it difficult enough to still interest veteran players. This is one of the reasons why Prologue is so punishing, especially to begin with, but at least that means you’ll be as fulfilled when you beat it the tenth time as you were the first time.
“We’re also playing with a lot of not necessarily tangible gameplay elements, like the distance between cabins,” Kamar says. Changing the value of blackberries has a very obvious impact—if you decrease their calories, then players will need x amount of more food to keep themselves satiated. But changing how many cabins spawn on a map or the incline of a hill can have impacts that are incredibly hard to predict. But the more players that take part in Prologue’s early access, the easier it will be to test out these variables and see which changes work and which don’t.
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Kurt Indovina
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