Immortality and Her Story developer Sam Barlow has announced Precognition, a new sci-fi horror game in development at Half Mermaid Productions, which features writing from Antiviral and Infinity Pool director Brandon Cronenberg. That’s Brandon, not David, yes, but still, having any kind of Cronenberg in your credits is a win, right? When’s the last time you made a game with a Cronenberg?

Besides, I thought Infinity Pool was good fun. And I quite like the sound of Precognition, which stars a woman with brain implants who can choose between visions to weave a range of possible dark futures. It began life as a slightly random idea for a Metroid game, apparently. Here’s a trailer.

Earlier this week, we attended a roundtable Q&A session with Barlow organised by Phasmophobia creators Kinetic, who have just launched a publishing label. He told us a little about how Precognition works. Broadly, it’s comparable to Immortality in being a game about assembling your own film by jumping between clips and piecing together plot connections, but this time, those clips are visions.

Main character Diana is a child prodigy with a photographic memory, who is participating in some kind of 1990s brainchip experiment. The experiment is designed to improve memory function, but the labcoats discover a side effect – patients start receiving ‘memories from the future’. Diana is special because she can preserve these memories where other patients swiftly forget them. She can also commit to particular memories, giving rise to particular timelines. Barlow compared it to the movie Memento, in which Guy Pearce’s amnesiac character preserves his past on Polaroids.

“With Immortality, there was an explicit swing to like, ‘making a horror game’,” Barlow commented during the Q&A. “I think we were quite vocal about it being a horror game, but it was still possible for people to play that game and not realise until too late. And so we wanted to kind of continue to push there, and once we had floated the idea for Precognition, we knew that we wanted to tell this story that is living in that sort of, ‘five minutes in the future’ kind of science fiction horror. That kind of science fiction horror that is about really terrible things that are just around the corner, and all of the things that are scary and broken in our current world.”

The game kicks off in the 90s partly “so that when we start getting further and further into the future, it doesn’t become too obsessed with the idea of what does the future look like – it doesn’t become too sci-fi, and it’s not a game about hanging out with robots,” Barlow added. “It’s much more about what can you do to change your own life, and what things would happen if you had precognition. But also because there was something about that sort of 90s last millennium sci-fi horror that I think had a particular flavour to it. I think the vision of the future back then was really interesting. In the 90s, you had this resurgence of people looking back at the 70s, and the grittiness. You had the neonoir movement, films like Strange Days…”

Precognition is “this huge complex attempt to map out a huge number of potential futures and timelines and things”, Barlow summarised. Somewhat hilariously, he pitched it to the rest of Half Mermaid as a cooldown project. “Way back when we started on this one, having come off Immortality, which somehow we managed to ship despite Covid, and it being a project that internally we were referring to as giving ourselves enough rope to hang ourselves with – initially I was like, we should pick something that is less silly and ambitious,” he said. “Just to give ourselves a break. And for at least a few days, I tried convincing everyone that that’s what this project was! It’s a little bit more genre, a little bit more understandable, but then very quickly it sort of bled out of control. So it is really complicated. There’s a lot of it.”

Barlow went on to compare the player’s degree of control over Precognition’s story to the unrestricted exploration of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – “you’re going to find cool stuff whatever direction you go in, stuff will just happen” – with the apologetic aside that “I have to put a dollar in the swear jar whenever I reference Zelda, because I do it too much”.

Precognition seemingly owes more to Samus Aran than Link, in any case. “Please don’t turn this into a clickbait headline,” Barlow foolishly implored the assembled journothrong, “but the very early idea for Precognition was me daydreaming about making an FMV Metroid game. Because I’m a huge Metroid fan, and anyone who’s paid attention over the years will realise that, like, Her Story, owed a debt to Metroid Prime in the whole sort of screen reflections stuff.

“It very much came from how cool the visor reflections were in Metroid,” he continued, “and just the idea of, in theory, breaking immersion by reminding you that you are not yourself, that you are Samus Aran in that game, but also, redoubling immersion… was sort of 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. So I would daydream about the idea of doing an FMV Metroid game. Someone jokingly mentioned it to Nintendo at points, but I could never get the idea to 100% make sense.” Eventually, Barlow thought up a twist and an accompanying story structure that were “way, way darker than anything Nintendo would be able to carry with its mascot characters”.

Barlow’s other inspirations for Precognition include Phillip K Dick and the movie Groundhog Day, with the caveat that a lot of his influences are a question of what “not to do”. This could be a Precognition spoiler, I guess, but Barlow is keen on “time travel stories that end in a sad place” – stories that suggest total freedom to begin with, but give way to inevitability as you realise that certain things are “tragically baked into your reality”.

As for Cronenberg, he wasn’t present in the call, but he has a few things to say in the video above. “I’m the filmmaker outsider who was brought in kind of for fun to collaborate on the writing,” Cronenberg explains, “so I was involved with Sam and his team on the story, and I wrote some of the scenes.” Cronenberg feels that his interest in making horror that is “really rooted in one character’s perspective… slotted neatly into this game”.

Precognition is due out in spring 2028. I don’t have access to any future memories with which to inform you whether it’ll be any good, so instead, I will shove you towards Alice Bell’s (RPS in peace) review of Barlow’s last project. “Immortality is an ambitious and considered look at art, storytelling, film, religion, and many other things,” she concluded, “but it doesn’t quite catch all the metaphorical apples it throws in the air.”