Sam Barlow and Brandon Cronenberg’s Precognition is a live-action sci-fi horror game about future memories, player agency, and the long wait to Spring 2028 on Switch 2.
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Store links: Precognition Dream's Greenhouse on Steam
Precognition is confirmed for Switch 2, but the real hook is the wait
Kinetic Publishing and Half Mermaid Productions have announced Precognition, a live-action sci-fi horror game from Immortality and Her Story creator Sam Barlow, with filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg collaborating on the story. The concrete platform news for Nintendo players is that Precognition is planned for Nintendo Switch 2, with Nintendo Life and Nintendo Everything both reporting a Spring 2028 target window.
That date gives the reveal an unusual shape. Precognition is no short-horizon surprise for horror fans to clear space for this Halloween. It is a long-range signal from Half Mermaid, now attached to Kinetic Publishing, the new label from Phasmophobia developer Kinetic. Eurogamer describes Precognition as one of Kinetic Publishing’s debut games, while The Escapist reports it as part of a broader 2028 publishing slate.
The long lead time also means the most useful way to read this reveal is carefully. The premise, collaborators, genre, Switch 2 confirmation, and Spring 2028 target are the firm points. Price, editions, performance targets, file size, ratings, and any possible Switch 2-specific features have not been announced in the provided source material. The trailer currently available through Kinetic is presented by outlets as a discussion video with Barlow, producer Natalie Watson, and Cronenberg rather than a full gameplay blowout. For now, Precognition is a promise of structure and tone more than a finished thing stalking down the hallway.
Diana’s future memories turn Barlow’s video-scouring design into cause and effect
The central idea of the Precognition game is close enough to Immortality to immediately raise ears, then different enough to make the comparison dangerous if taken too literally. Rock Paper Shotgun reports that Barlow described it broadly as a game about assembling meaning by jumping between clips and piecing together plot connections. Eurogamer frames it as another Barlow-style archive-scouring mystery, but with a twist: the archive is made of future memories.
The protagonist, Diana, is described across the reveal coverage as a woman involved in a 1990s brain implant experiment. According to Rock Paper Shotgun’s account of a press Q&A with Barlow, Diana is a child prodigy with a photographic memory. The experiment is meant to improve memory function, but the implant produces a side effect: patients receive memories from the future. Diana’s distinction is that she can retain those memories when others forget them.
The play concept sits in that retention. Eurogamer quotes Barlow explaining that players watch visions of the future and hold the triggers down to commit a moment to memory. Once Diana preserves a detail, the future changes. Barlow compared Diana’s collected future moments to the Polaroids in Memento, except these are fragments pulled backward from lives that may no longer happen.
That is the mechanical reason Immortality fans should pay attention. Immortality asked players to investigate images and performance, finding hidden connections inside film clips. Precognition appears to shift that method toward consequence. Nintendo Everything quotes Barlow saying Half Mermaid has pushed harder by bringing investigation and mystery game feeling into “a world of cause-and-effect,” with a story that “spins out as a consequence of your choices.” If that design lands, the tension will not only come from discovering what happened, but from choosing which possible horror Diana drags back into the present.
Brandon Cronenberg’s role points toward subjective body-and-mind horror
The Brandon Cronenberg horror game angle is not window dressing in the announcement. Nintendo Everything reports that Cronenberg is collaborating with Barlow on the story, and Eurogamer says he co-developed the story and wrote it alongside Barlow. The sources identify him as the director of films including Antiviral, Possessor, and Infinity Pool, all of which makes the pairing legible even before Half Mermaid shows how the game plays in full.
Cronenberg’s quoted comments focus on subjectivity rather than monsters. Nintendo Life quotes him saying his films tend to be “subjective and experiential,” with horror emerging as one person’s perspective warps around them. He adds that Barlow’s games are subjective by their nature because no two people have the same experience with them.
That matters for reading the reveal without overselling it. Nothing in the provided material confirms enemy types, combat systems, stealth, chase mechanics, or resource management. As a horror proposition, Precognition is currently being sold through instability: a person whose memory becomes a tool, a threat, and a branching map of possible ruin. For players who come to horror looking for pressure rather than ammunition counts, that is a promising nerve. For players who need creature design, survival loops, or hands-on danger before buying in, those details remain unshown.
The 1990s setting keeps the future close enough to feel infected
Barlow’s comments to Rock Paper Shotgun give the setting a clear function. Precognition begins in the 1990s partly so the game can move further into the future without becoming preoccupied with futuristic spectacle. Barlow said it is not a game about “hanging out with robots,” but about what someone could do to change their own life if they had precognition.
He also tied the setting to what he called “90s last millennium sci-fi horror,” citing a particular flavor shaped by the decade’s view of the future, its renewed interest in 1970s grit, neo-noir, and films such as Strange Days. In the same Q&A, Barlow described the target as “five minutes in the future” science fiction horror, the kind concerned with terrible things just around the corner and with what is frightening and broken in the current world.
That phrase is doing heavy atmospheric work. It suggests Precognition is aiming for dread that feels near rather than cosmic, with technology as a pressure point on identity, memory, intimacy, and control. The implant is not being described as a superpower fantasy. It is an invasive instrument that lets Diana see outcomes and then makes her responsible, or at least complicit, when preserving one detail reshapes everything that follows.
Switch 2 is confirmed, while broader platform details need careful attribution
For Nintendo readers, the headline fact is straightforward: Precognition Switch 2 is confirmed in reports from Nintendo Life and Nintendo Everything, both citing the Kinetic Publishing and Half Mermaid Productions announcement. Nintendo Life says the game is targeting Spring 2028. Nintendo Everything also lists Spring 2028.
The broader platform picture is slightly less uniform across the supplied sources. The Escapist reports that Precognition will launch on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 in Spring 2028. The Nintendo-focused reports emphasize Switch 2, while Eurogamer’s provided text confirms the Spring 2028 release window but does not list every platform in the excerpt. There is no contradiction there, but there is an attribution gap: readers should treat the full platform spread as reported by The Escapist unless and until Kinetic or Half Mermaid’s own store pages and press materials are in front of them.
Practical questions remain open. The sources do not provide a price, physical release information, accessibility options, save structure, visual mode details, or whether the Switch 2 version will arrive simultaneously with the other reported platforms. Because Precognition is built around cinematic live-action sequences, the eventual Switch 2 implementation will be worth watching for storage requirements, video quality, loading behavior, and input feel. None of those concerns are answered by the reveal.
Immortality fans should watch the agency claims, not only the pedigree
The phrase “Immortality developer new game” carries weight because Barlow and Half Mermaid have built a reputation around letting players find story through attention rather than through a straight corridor of objectives. Her Story and Immortality both turned watching into active investigation, asking players to notice faces, words, cuts, gestures, and absences. Precognition appears to keep that investigative foundation while adding a heavier promise: the act of noticing can alter the future being investigated.
That promise is also the risk. Branching narrative horror can sound bottomless in reveal language, but it lives or dies by whether choices feel specific, legible, and troubling. Eurogamer reports Barlow describing an “inventory of alternate possible futures,” while Rock Paper Shotgun’s excerpt cuts off as Barlow begins describing a huge complex attempt to map many potential futures. The ambition is clear. The unanswered question is how the game will keep that complexity readable without draining the unease from it.
For Immortality fans, the closest thing to a practical recommendation is patience with sharp attention. If you loved piecing together meaning from performance and structure, Precognition is one to watch closely through future gameplay showings. If you bounced off Barlow’s earlier work because you wanted conventional movement, combat, or survival-horror systems, the reveal does not yet indicate a pivot toward those comforts. The horror, as described so far, is in memory, causality, and the awful knowledge that choosing what to keep may be the thing that lets the future rot.