Train survival games are all the rage in PC gaming right now, with Chris Livingston spying six railway-related survival sims arriving at platform PC in 2026. But these life-sustaining locomotives were all pulled onto the tracks by Voidtrain, a survival sim in which you drive an interdimensional train through a vast, eerie cosmos.

While it only launched in 2025, Voidtrain is the de-facto grandaddy of train-based survival sims, having chugged away merrily in Steam early access for four years before formally releasing. Developer HypeTrain Digital is still shovelling coal into the engine, too, with this week bringing a small patch, a big discount, and a sprinkling of DLC you can grab for free if you're quick.

The primary change in the patch is a "significantly increased" inventory capacity for both players and containers, which should help address some player complaints that storage becomes overfilled too easily. The update also fixes numerous bugs, improves the crafting UI, and makes changes to railway depots so that they don't always involve a combat encounter— adding a new "peaceful variant" of depot to give players a change of pace.

The DLC, meanwhile, is called 'Tour de Void', and centres around a sequence of activities involving the game's cute 'Rofleemo' pets. Rather than Rofleemo lingering forlornly at depots, the DLC lets them travel with you on the train as passengers. You can build seats for them to ride on as well as a tourist stand, where Rofleemo will give players tasks and challenges they can complete for various rewards. These range from cosmetics like rail skins and train decorations, to more functional perks and upgrades.

Tour de Void normally costs $8 (£6), but you can grab it for free until Monday. If you don't own Voidtrain already, the base game is currently available for 50% off at $15 (£12.50), with that discount ending on March 5.

As for whether you should buy Voidtrain, Fraser Brown enjoyed the early access version a few years' back. "I'm not often surprised by survival games, but this one feels a bit special," he wrote in 2021. "It's full of novelties and oddities, and it's the most fun I've had filling my inventory with junk in a long time." The final version, meanwhile, has a mostly positive rating on Steam, with players praising the concept and character, but criticising its grindy survival progression and clunky FPS combat.

Towards the end of last month, Brendan Greene's studio PlayerUnknown Productions finally launched its new survival simulator into early access. And it's changed quite a bit in just the few weeks it's been out.

Prologue: Go Wayback! started with a single mode: survival. In this, you'd get dropped into a new procedurally generated map and have to survive the elements, keep yourself fed and watered, and finally find the lighthouse, which is the only way out of the game. It may sound simple, but there were loads of variables which could greatly help or hinder your chances of success, spawning in the middle of a lake being one such example.

But since it launched into early access at the end of November, the devs have already added a few extra features. "It was through the feedback of people on our servers and in our TeamSpeak at the time that we improved the game mode," Greene tells me. "At first, I thought, 'Okay, a nice survival loop would be cool'. But then, with the community's feedback over the last months, we now have a free run mode."

Now, instead of surviving long enough to escape the map, players have the option to just keep the game going as long as possible. You can save and come back with the intention of staying on the same map and making it as nice as possible to keep yourself alive.

"The main game mode is going to be pretty difficult," Greene says. "But objective survival is even harder. There are no cabins, you just have to survive for as long as you can, against the weather, foraging and this kind of stuff."

But not everyone playing Prologue is interested in making their time in the game as difficult as possible. There have also been calls for an easier mode: "Then we have a free roam mode where it turns off everything, or turns off all health and all that. So you can just wander around the maps."

This is the kind of game I'd be interested in playing. It may not sound as thrilling, but there are some seriously beautiful views in Prologue, and it seems a shame to waste those on someone who's slowly starving to death and is desperately hunting down mushrooms.

"I want to build games with the community, rather than for them, because that's how I got into gaming; I came from modding," Greene says. "Early Access is the oven. It requires some time in there. It's used by a lot of bigger games as a kind of open beta. They add a finished game that just needs some balance tweaks and stuff like this, rather than a true beta or even an alpha. But we're trying to use early access in the way it was meant to be."

Greene has a few ideas as to what he wants to see in Prologue before they decide to leave early access, but there's no great rush to add these. The team is instead taking a more holistic approach to progress.

"We have a few of the leads that have worked in more traditional AA or AAA structures or corporate structures, and they say they can't see going back to working any other way than with the community," Greene says. "Because it has been so enlightening to them to see how much people really do care about the game.

"There are, of course, marketing deadlines, you've got shows to appeal to, and then there's stock prices, and all kinds of stuff come into the equation. But I'm happy that we're independent. We have a great team that loves what they're doing. So I've always been like, it's ready when it's ready. I don't want to push out stuff before it's ready. There are a few comments that it wasn't really ready yet, but that's the point of early access: to build a game with the community."

When I first played Prologue: Go Wayback! at the beginning of 2025, my first thought was 'Boy, this would be great if there were a bear or two in these woods'. Don't get me wrong, I liked the survival loop of roaming around, damp and hungry, but I always thought animals would add a little bit of life to the map.

But alas, any hope of getting chased through the woods by a bear has been struck down as PlayerUnknown himself, Brendan Greene, clarified what is and isn't on the table for Prologue's upcoming DLCs.

"Number two requested feature, can you add animals?" Greene tells me. "But, if we add animals, that would mean you need something to defend from animals. While we can technically add animals, as we figured out pathfinding stuff for the world, it's a lot of resources to program good AI for animals. You want them to feel real, especially in the world we're building.

"So to get it to the stage that I'd be happy with would require a lot of resources and time. I want to spend that time focused on building a more complete world, with paths, power lines, and even bigger points of interest that are not just cabins. That's where I want to focus the team, rather than adding more things for you to worry about. I think the weather is sufficiently worrying at this stage."

But just because we won't be hunting rabbits or wrestling wolves any time soon doesn't mean that the devs don't want to make Prologue a little livelier. "I'd like to see underground areas," Greene explains. "I'm not sure we can do them yet, but I want to see this idea, because that's part of the story as well, getting access to this. Because I'm thinking, if we can do this, maybe it's a DLC one, where you have to get access to underground areas on the map that appear. So this kind of it's, I'd like to see that, but for now, it'll be more larger points of interest with a few cabins or more interesting buildings, rather than just a single point of interest."

Prologue has already had a fair few new features added in the weeks it's been in early access. There have been a couple of hot fixes and two new modes added, one for casuals (me) and one for players who want to make life as hard as possible for themselves. But it's unlikely that the devs stick too rigidly to this cadence for updates.

"We don't want to lock it down too tightly, because, again, working with the community in early access, so these plans can be changed sometimes," Greene explains. "For Prologue, I imagined about a year in early access. Maybe more, depending on when the sort of generation tech is stable enough. And then we planned three DLCs where we can add story points and lower points, while adding more depth to the world."

As was mentioned above, these DLCs would not just add a story to Prologue alongside new places of interest like caverns; there's also a possibility that multiplayer could be brought to the game.

"I keep saying, co-op multiplayer, DLC three," Greene says. "That's what I'd like to see. But if the producer is reading this, I'd like them to know that there is no stress putting multiplayer in just now. Although it is one of the most requested things."

Aside from getting mauled by a bear, multiplayer would be my most anticipated feature for Prologue. The beautiful yet mysterious world lends itself wonderfully to exploring with friends. I'm sure players would also find new ways to break or shake up the game with a friend by their side. But all of this is still fairly far away, and in the meantime, the devs are seemingly focused on just providing the best experience possible to players.

"To get out of Early Access, I'd really like to see the world with a little bit more infrastructure," Greene says. "Essentially infinite forest and the vista, because a bit sort of low at the moment. These are kind of like visual tweaks, but also optimisation tweaks to really make the game run well."