Sam Barlow has announced his follow-up to Immortality. It’s called Precognition, it’s sci-fi horror, and the writing credit belongs to Brandon Cronenberg, the filmmaker behind Antiviral and Infinity Pool. Barlow has described the subject matter as “really terrible things that are just around the corner.” The premise involves visions of the future, and seeing them is not presented as a gift.
Every outlet that covered this led with the Cronenberg name, and fair enough. But the detail that reframes the whole announcement is buried lower: spring 2028. That’s not a teaser date. That’s a company telling you it has runway.
The date is the news
Immortality came out in 2022 and won a pile of awards while selling like an art film, which is to say fine, not transformative. Half Mermaid spent the years since without a shipped follow-up. Announcing a game roughly two and a half years out, with a named collaborator and a publishing partner already attached, is what studios do when the money is settled and they want the talent pipeline visible before production gets loud.
That partner is Kinetic, the publishing label from the company behind Phasmophobia. Precognition is one of its debut titles. Phasmophobia money is real money, the kind of indie-horror windfall that funds a decade of experiments, and Kinetic is spending some of it on a director whose games are essentially interactive film archaeology. That’s a bet on prestige and press, not on unit volume.
Live-action is the hard part
Barlow’s games run on footage. Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality all required shooting substantial amounts of live-action material, and Immortality shot three entire fake films. You can’t iterate on that the way you iterate on code. Casting, scheduling, principal photography, and post all have to land before the interaction design can even be tested at scale. A 2028 date on a Half Mermaid project reads less like caution and more like an honest accounting of how long it takes to make the thing.
Bringing in Cronenberg makes sense on those terms too. He works in body horror and institutional dread, and he directs. That’s a collaborator who understands what a shooting schedule costs, not just a name to put in a trailer.
What I’d want to know
The hook, as described, is that you see the future and can change it. Barlow’s previous games gave you a database and a search box; you were an archivist, powerless over events that had already happened. Precognition inverts that. Agency over outcomes is a genuinely different design problem from agency over discovery, and it’s not obvious the scrubbing-through-footage interface survives the switch intact.
No footage has been shown. No cast has been named. What exists right now is a title, a genre, a writer, a publisher, and a season two springs from now.