Most survival games begin the same way: you are standing alone in the wilderness with few supplies and equipment. You may have only basic food supplies and bandages. Sometimes you have a basic knife or axe. Often, they start out with only a single flimsy loincloth and must immediately scavenge for food, water, and basic crafting resources.

So finding a survival game where you start with absolutely nothing except a time machine is a bit unusual.

But this is what you get at the beginning of Grand Emprise: in Time Travel Survival, you use that time machine to travel through history, from the dinosaur era to the colonial era to the present day to the future.

Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival will be released next month, but the free demo, part of Steam Next Fest, gives you a little taste of both the survival crafting system and the era-hopping adventure that awaits. With only a time travel device in hand and instructions to pick up a stone to fix a broken machine, the demo begins in what appears to be the early days of Earth. Picking up a rock on the beach and smashing it into the time machine sent me to the future (i.e., the past future) and to the age of dinosaurs.

As you can imagine, with nothing in my inventory but a time machine with a dead battery, I was quickly eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. But all was not lost! After respawning, I peeked into the tech tree and learned how to recharge my time machine and get out of there. I won't bore you with the details, but I will say that I mercilessly bludgeoned a docile Triceratops to death with a collection of rocks, charmed a Utahraptor with its delicious raw dinosaur meat, and then had it carry me on its back as we raced across the island and deep into a cave to find a time portal that would lead us to a mysterious, ancient temple.

All a bit strange, but it wasn't long before we were able to travel to another time period. It seems that no matter which era I go to, I get bitten to death by a large land animal.

I haven't gotten too far into Grand Emprise yet, but it seems pretty ambitious, incorporating a variety of eras and technologies, from forging iron tools to managing primitive colonies to sieging castles to conquering space travel. It also seems that technology can be transported from one era to another, so if I want to take revenge on the T-Rex for eating me, I can confront it with guns and biplanes.

From giant sandworms to futuristic mech battles, look at how much wild stuff is packed into the trailer above. And that's even more impressive since it's made by a single developer, so check out the free demo on Steam and watch out for hungry T-Rex.