Sam Barlow × Brandon Cronenberg: Precognition Is the Genre's Biggest Bet on 2028

The arthouse pole of interactive film just got its next landmark. At the inaugural Kinetic Publishing Showcase on August 12, Sam Barlow’s Half Mermaid unveiled Precognition, a live-action sci-fi horror game co-created with filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg (Possessor, Infinity Pool), launching Spring 2028 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch 2 and PC.

Half Mermaid’s Immortality remains the formal high-water mark Barlow now has to beat.

The premise

Diana, a prodigy with a photographic memory, receives an experimental brain implant in the 1990s that produces visions of the future. The mechanic is the horror: remembering a glimpsed detail changes what follows, recall branches the timeline. It’s the most Barlow idea imaginable (memory as gameplay, footage as evidence) fused with a director whose whole cinema is about consciousness invading bodies.

Why it matters

Three reads from where we sit:

1. The auteur lane keeps escalating. Immortality proved a playable film could be first-rank cinema; recruiting an actual Cronenberg formalizes the film-world merger the genre has been drifting toward, the same star-power logic that put Aaron Paul in Dispatch.
2. The industrial lane isn’t waiting. Spring 2028 is a long way off. Between now and then, the production-line studios, led by ALT Lab, whose two-player Bonds of Shadows lands this month, will have shipped multiple films. Craft versus cadence is becoming the genre’s defining race.
3. Publisher musical chairs. Precognition moved to Kinetic from the original Blumhouse Games arrangement, worth remembering the next time someone says the traditional industry has figured out how to hold onto interactive film.

No mobile platforms announced, which regular readers will recognize as the genre’s most persistent blind spot.