Sam Barlow partners with filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg on sci-fi thriller game Precognition

Kinetic Publishing and Half Mermaid Productions hannounced Precognition, a live-action sci-fi horror game from Immortality and Her Story creator Sam Barlow, in a collaboration with horror director Brandon Cronenberg.

Originally teased as ‘Project C’, Precognition follows in the footsteps of Barlow’s video game Immortality, combining cinematic full-motion video sequences with non-linear storytelling and a focus on player freedom and agency.

Players take on the role of Diana, a woman who discovers she can receive visions of the future after an experimental implant is embedded into her brain.

Diana is a former child prodigy. She has a photographic memory, and her brain is very malleable for other bad things she’s done, Barlow said.

“And she’s brought into this experiment where they’re putting implants in people’s heads, ostensibly to augment or improve memory, and they discover a side effect of this device is that people start receiving memories of the future,” Barlow said in a press briefing. “However, everyone else that is in this test quickly forgets what they’ve seen. It’s like when you wake from a dream and your brain erases your memory of the dream to avoid you going mad. However, because of Diana’s unique mind, she is able to see these visions, these memories of her future, and watch them, and then choose an instant from these memories to collect and commit to memory.”

It’s like she is collecting Polaroids of her future, like in the classic film Memento, he said. What are the important things to bring back?

In the story, Diana has an implant in her brain with the side effect that she receives visions of her own future.

“Making a game like Precognition has been a natural evolution of what we did on Immortality, but we’ve really been trying to test the limits of non-linear storytelling,” Barlow said in a press briefing.

“We have a real focus on the game feel and player agency and freedom. So in Immortality, we had this magical match cut feature. So it allowed you to almost put together your own film and create this narrative where you jump from point to point. You’re jumping around time and space, finding these connections,” Barlow said. “The same magic that powers this lens can also grant you what you wish.”

Barlow added, “If you sit someone down to play one of our games, within the first few minutes, everyone is off in a different direction. And with Precognition, we want to take that to the next level. From the very beginning, you are seeing through Diana’s eyes, and then once the experiment begins, Diana starts receiving these visions, which for her she essentially organizes as memories.”

Barlow said these are memories of the future she hasn’t yet lived. She is able to experience this vision and then focus and concentrate on a moment and commit that to memory, and immediately on doing that, the future changes. If you’re not familiar with our previous games, Immortality, Sam’s game, Her Story, Telling Lies, this might look very different from what you expect of a video game. You might have a notebook on your desk as you’re playing and go back over and over looking at clips to understand what you’re seeing or figuring out what you are missing.

With Diana, the game begins in the 1990s. As the story progresses, it is much more about what you can do to change your own life, Barlow said.

“What things would happen if you start having that precognition?” he said.

Tom Cruise in Minority Report inspired lots of tech and game companies. It sounds a lot like sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick’s short story Minority Report. Barlow said he is a big fan of Dick’s work. But don’t get Barlow started on the movie.

Players will be tasked with exploring these visions of the future, focusing on specific moments and committing them to Diana’s memory in the present day. Prescience comes with consequences, however, and as soon as Diana commits a detail to memory, the very future ahead of her changes.

“We’ve really been trying to test the limits of non-linear storytelling, focusing on how the game feels to play, while encouraging player agency and freedom,” said Barlow, cofounder of Half Mermaid Productions. “We’ve pushed ourselves even harder with Precognition by bringing the feel of investigation and mystery games into a world of cause-and-effect, with a story that spins out as a consequence of your choices.”

There are more than 30 onscreen characters in Telling Lies. Half Mermaid Productions has partnered with acclaimed horror film director Brandon Cronenberg on Precognition, with Cronenberg co-developing the story and joining the game’s writing room alongside Barlow.

“We wanted Precognition to be a very authentic sci-fi horror experience, and in the process of searching for collaborators on the project, Brandon stood out as the perfect person for the job,” said Barlow. “Brandon had already played Immortality and Her Story, so he immediately understood the nature of the game and the unique narrative structure we bring to everything we make”.

“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,” said Cronenberg, in a statement. “The games that Sam and the team have made over the years are subjective experiences by their very nature – no two people will have the same experience with them. So it’s the perfect place to explore these themes further”.

Precognition launches on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 in Spring 2028.

Launched in 2026, Kinetic Publishing is the publishing label of Kinetic Games, the UK-based developer behind 27+ million selling horror phenomenon Phasmophobia.

Founded to champion innovation within the indie game development space, Kinetic Publishing aims to offer the level of support that would have benefitted Phasmophobia creator Daniel Knight at the start of his journey, and to help developers make incredible games without compromising their creative vision.

In 2027, Kinetic Publishing is launching gritty starship job simulator Contact Protocol and open world witch-tech delivery game Crescent County, followed by Precognition, Shellbound, and Aether Wizard Life in 2028.

Asim Tanvir, head of marketing at Kinetic publishing, said in a press briefing that in a case like this, the publishing team believes in the creative vision and authenticity is important.

“We don’t want to take a game and turn it into something that it isn’t. They remain in control of their creative vision, and our role is to bring that experience and resource and marketing support and everything else to help make their vision be as successful as possible,” Asim said.

Half Mermaid Productions is a video game production company based in Brooklyn, New York. Founded in 2017 by four-time Bafta-winning writer-director Barlow, creator of Her Story.

A thriller like no other. In 2022, Half Mermaid Productions released Immortality to critical acclaim, including receiving the first perfect 10/10 score in Edge Magazine for an independent game. It tells the story of Marissa Marcel, a vanished actress who starred in three movies that were never released.

Cronenberg made horror films including Antiviral, Possessor and Infinity Pool. He joined in as a kind of outsider to work on the writing for the game. Barlow said the team wanted to plant a flag in pure sci-fi horror, and they went through a process of “speed dating” horror directors.

“Brandon was the one who, straight out the gate, we sparked with. He’d already played Her Story and Immortality, so he understood the games,” Barlow said.

“The horror films I have made up to this point tend to be very subjective. They’re very experiential, where you’re really rooted in one character’s perspective,, and that’s part of the experience of the horror,” Cronenberg said. “The world is is warping, and it’s it’s warping dependent on their psychology, and and so it slotted neatly into this game because it’s it’s a very subjective experience.”

Barlow said, the past games “have proven that there is an appetite for stories that are a bit more complex, a bit darker, a bit stranger, but also the idea of it’s always about the freedom that you, as a player, have to explore the story, to feel like you’re making the story happen in a way that’s unique to you.”

Ben Starr of Kinetic Publishing said Precognition is one of the first five games that the company is revealing from indie game developers who are creating amazing experiences and worlds. You can wishlist them now. He said the publishing team is a big fan of what Barlow has done before.

Sam Barlow came to E3 2019 to talk about Telling Lies. In a Q&A, Barlow said, “As much as everyone talks about a saturated market and the challenges that you face in video games now, I think the reassuring thing I tell myself is if you just keep making the thing that no one else is making, and if you spend more time and effort on it than anyone else would dream of doing, you’re going to create something of worth.”

He said that with the digital era, developers can now make the weirdest things and there will be enough people out there who will find it.

“You just have to make sure they know about it. It’s continuing to try out new stuff, and we try as much as from a million mile high perspective. We keep making these nonlinear video things. Each of the games is quite different from each other, and we’re pushing out into very different directions, and that’s definitely the case with Precognition,” Barlow said.

He said he loves the idea of time travel. You know, at its heart, I love the idea of time travel. He said he plays every game based on a time travel story. Those games have parts where you can replay a section and then find out different consequences. That was the experience of Her Story.

“I’ve never played a game that lets me screw around with the idea of time travel in a way that that feels like the sort of butterfly flapping its wings. The myriad possibilities are achievable, and there’s a reason for that. It’s very complicated and hard, but yeah, that’s what I cling to.”

Cronenberg said, “For players and fans who have loved Sam’s previous games, they are going to be in for a very good treat with Precognition.”

Metroid Prime. Asked about the experience he wanted to deliver, Barlow said, “This is not spoilery. So please don’t turn this into a clickbait headline. But the very early idea of Precognition was me daydreaming about making a FMV Metroid game because I’m a huge Metroid fan, and anyone that’s paid attention to my tweets over the years will realize that Her Story owed a debt to Metroid Prime in the screen reflection stuff.”

He added, “It very much came from how cool all the visor reflections were in Metroid and just that idea of breaking immersion by reminding you that you are not yourself. That you are Samus Aran in that game. Redoubling the immersion was a touchstone for me with how Her Story and then the other games sort of played with that idea of who you are in the game. I would like daydream about this idea of doing an FMV Metroid game.”

For the most part, that has been an idea left on the shelf, he said. But he noted there is a dark twist to this story where it really clicks.

“There is a moment in Immortality where things happen that we always knew was ideally going to be a really special moment for people, and that’s when in the initial phase of alpha testing, where we realized it was landing for people, and I would get sort of messages at three a.m. from people like, ‘Holy shit! What just happened? I’m freaking out,'” Barlow said.

He said you make choices in gameplay, then the story unfolds, and you can see where that goes.

“That sense of actually there being a narrative that unspools from what you’re doing, having people have that light bulb moment of realizing that’s how the experience feels, I think would be pretty cool,” Barlow said.

Regarding the Minority Report film, Barlow said, “I’m sure if I went back and watched Minority Report now, I’d probably appreciate it more. I remember leaving the cinema fuming after that one. Any time travel media that makes me feel sad… You’re like, ‘Wow this is an incredible ability to to escape the limitations that we have as a human being, but you immediately then actually start to hit bigger problems, right? You start to see the things that are inevitable and the things that are tragically baked in your reality as much as you start trying to screw with the different timelines.”

I’m not sure how Barlow got onto this part. But I share his view. He said, “I was forever being told earlier in my career, like, don’t worry about the end of the game. Only 20% of players will see it, so spend the money on the opening hour, which is going to be our E3 demo. And I’d always be like, ‘Well, the ending is the bit that seals the deal and lands your story.”

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