Today at the inaugural Kinetic Publishing showcase, Sam Barlow and his studio, Half Mermaid, wrapped up the show with our fist real tidbits of information around their mysterious new game, “Project C.” Its actual title is Precognition, it’s an FMV horror game about a woman who receives visions of the future, and it originated as an idea Barlow had for an FMV Metroid game.
We didn’t actually see any footage or gameplay from Precognition today, but we did learn a bit about what it’s doing, and (sort of) what we’ll be doing. Precognition is a sci-fi/horror/thriller that follows a woman named Diana who has had an implant put in her brain that gives her visions of her own future, which she then organizes as “memories” that she hasn’t lived yet. She can then focus on a moment and commit it to memory, but by committing a moment to memory, she’s changing the future.
If you’re familiar with Barlow’s past games (Immortality, Her Story, Telling Lies), you might be able to piece together what sort of game this is based on past experience. In the presentation, it’s described as non-linear, with a focus on player agency and freedom, and it’s also suggested this might be a “notebook” game, one where you’re constantly taking notes to try to figure out what’s really going on. Half Mermaid has also brought on Canadian director and writer Brandon Cronenberg (Antiviral, Possessor, Infinity Pool) as a writer on the project.
During a Q&A session about Precognition ahead of this announcement, Barlow talked about where the idea for this game originated, and it certainly wasn’t the origin story I was expecting to hear. Barlow says it came from an idea he had for an FMV Metroid game that he turned over in his head for a long time, but which ended up too dark to ever seriously pitch as a Samus Aran adventure. Here’s how Barlow explains it:
The very early idea of Precognition was me daydreaming about making an FMV Metroid game. I’m a huge Metroid fan and anyone who’s paid attention to my tweets over the years will realize that Her Story owed a debt to Metroid Prime. The whole screen reflection stuff came from how cool the visor reflections were in Metroid and just that idea of breaking immersion by reminding you that you’re not yourself, that you are Samus Aran, but actually redoubling the immersion, was sort of a touchstone for me with how Her Story and the other games played with the idea of who you are in the game.
I would daydream about this idea of doing an FMV Metroid game—somewhat jokingly mention it to Nintendo at points—but I could never get the idea to 100 percent make sense. Our process here is, I’ll often have ideas on the shelf or in my head that are, this is a cool idea, and it’ll sit there until it’s 100 percent, until I completely see that this is a full experience that makes sense. I could never push that idea to that point, and then one day I realized—I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say there are twists—there is this dark twist to this story [where] actually suddenly, everything clicks. This thing has structure and the theme makes sense and the mechanics speak to that and I can see the full experience that the players will get. But suddenly it’s a much darker story. Way darker than anything that my beloved Nintendo would be able to carry with its mascot characters. That really was the spark.
As someone who’s already on board with basically anything Barlow and Half Mermaid create, consider me even more intrigued. Precognition is coming to PC on Steam, PS5, Xbox Series, and Nintendo Switch 2 in spring of 2028. This is also not to be confused with Project D, which is Half Mermaid’s other game and for which details have still not been revealed.
