The new game from Her Story and Immortality maker Sam Barlow – and his studio Half Mermaid – has a name: it’s called Precognition. It’s a sci-fi horror and it’s releasing in spring 2028, as one of the debut games from Phasmophobia company Kinetic’s new publishing label.
As with Barlow’s previous games, Precognition is a game about scouring archives of video clips to solve a mystery. Here, in Precognition, those archives are the future memories of main character Diana.
The set-up is that Diana received an experimental implant which allows her to see visions of her future. And when she does, she’s able to focus on moments within them and commit them to memory. But there’s a catch: by doing so, she’ll set off a butterfly effect that changes her future. The idea then is to actively manipulate her memories to change the outcome.
The other notable thing about Precognition is it’s being made in collaboration with horror filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg, who I haven’t heard of because I’m that sort of person, but who made the films Infinity Pool, Possessor, and Antiviral. I have heard of his father David Cronenberg, though, who created legendary movies like The Fly. Brandon Cronenberg co-developed the story of Precognition and wrote it alongside Barlow.
In a Q&A session following a showcase for Precognition, which I attended, Barlow revealed a few more details about the game. “The thing that’s really neat here is Diana is a former child prodigy,” he began. “She has a photographic memory and her brain is very malleable, and she’s brought into this experiment where they’re putting implants in people’s heads, ostensibly to augment or improve memory, fix how people’s memory works, and they discover a side effect of this device is that people start receiving memories of the future.”
“As a player, you watch these visions of the future and you hold the triggers down and that commits [it] to memory” -Sam Barlow
Everyone else quickly forgets what they’ve seen but Diana: she doesn’t. “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,” Barlow said. “As a player, you watch these visions of the future and you hold the triggers down and that commits [it] to memory.
“So if you imagine something like the movie Memento, where he’s walking around with his Polaroids: Diana is collecting Polaroids of her future. So as the player, you have complete freedom to decide ‘What do I think is useful to send back – what is important information that I can send back from the future?’, and as soon as you do that, the future changes and you get a new vision.”
You’re effectively amassing an “inventory of alternate possible futures”, Barlow explained. And sure, you could do something boring with this power like get the winning lottery numbers, but you could also do more intriguing things. “It might be interesting to know that your partner of 10 years has been cheating on you with your brother or something, right?” Barlow mused.
There’s “a huge amount” of freedom in the game – it’s very systemic – and he said that “very quickly you get into this really cool gameplay [loop] of creating and kind of sculpting an inventory to steer the future … and it gets very exciting and surprising”. There’s a few more layers to it but that’s it in essence.
“This is the most grokkable – I can’t say grok any more, can I? Damn you, [Elon] Musk! It’s the most grokkable mechanic of our games in terms of there’s a really concrete understanding of its role in the story,” Barlow concluded. “It is a diegetic mechanic and it has these direct consequences for the story that unfolds.”
Precognition is in development for PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X and Switch 2.
