Sam Barlow, the developer behind Her Story and Immortality, has finally put a name to the project he teased in 2024 as Project C. It's called Precognition, a sci-fi horror game from his studio Half Mermaid Productions, revealed during the Kinetic Publishing Showcase. The game is co-written with filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg, and it's currently expected to launch in spring 2028.
The reveal lines up neatly with Barlow's back catalogue. Precognition once again puts you in front of an archive of video clips to piece together a mystery, except this time the clips aren't found footage. They're visions of the future.
What you actually do
You play Diana, a former child prodigy with a photographic memory who enrolls in a 1990s brain-implant experiment. The chip is meant to augment or repair memory, but the researchers discover a side effect: patients start receiving what Barlow calls "memories of the future." Everyone else forgets these visions almost immediately. Diana doesn't.
The core mechanic is built around that. According to Barlow, you watch a vision play out and hold the triggers down to commit a specific moment to memory. He compared it to the film Memento, where the protagonist keeps his life on Polaroids: "Diana is collecting Polaroids of her future." The catch is that pinning down a moment sets off a butterfly effect, changing the timeline and generating a new vision.
Barlow told a roundtable Q&A, attended by Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun, that you effectively build an "inventory of alternate possible futures" and use it to steer where things end up. He described the loop as "creating and kind of sculpting an inventory to steer the future," and stressed the game is heavily systemic with "a huge amount" of freedom. He even reached for a Breath of the Wild comparison, noting that whatever direction you head, "stuff will just happen."
The Cronenberg connection
Barlow says he wanted "a very authentic sci-fi horror experience," which led him to Brandon Cronenberg, director of Antiviral, Possessor, and Infinity Pool (and son of David Cronenberg). Cronenberg, who has played both Immortality and Her Story, co-developed the story and wrote it alongside Barlow.
"The films I make tend to be subjective and experiential, with the horror emerging as one person's perspective of the world warps around them," Cronenberg said, adding that Barlow's games are subjective by nature since no two players share the same experience.
Barlow framed the tone as "five minutes in the future" science fiction, describing it to RPS as horror "about really terrible things that are just around the corner." The 1990s starting point is deliberate, he explained, so the story doesn't get "too sci-fi" or turn into a game about hanging out with robots. Odd bit of trivia: Barlow says Precognition began as a daydream about making an FMV Metroid game, before the twist he landed on turned "way, way darker than anything Nintendo would be able to carry with its mascot characters."
Where and when
Precognition is in development for PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S and X, and Switch 2. It's one of the debut titles for the new publishing label from Kinetic, the studio behind Phasmophobia. A spring 2028 window is a long wait, so this is one to wishlist rather than watch a countdown for.
For anyone tracking narrative and FMV games, Precognition slots in beside Barlow's earlier work as a marquee release to keep tabs on, even at this distance. If you're circling the calendar, expect a quiet stretch before it lands, with Immortality still the obvious homework in the meantime.