Sam Barlow and Half Mermaid pulled back the curtain on their next game at the Kinetic Publishing showcase. Project C is now officially called Precognition, and it's a sci-fi thriller built on the same full-motion video DNA that made Immortality such a fever dream. But the wild part is where this thing actually came from.

Before it became the cinematic thriller announced at the showcase, Precognition started as something completely different: a pitch for an FMV Metroid game.

Yeah. Let that one sit for a second.

According to Kotaku's reporting, Barlow was originally kicking around the idea of wrapping the exploration and progression of Metroid around live-action video. Think crawling through mysterious corridors, unlocking new areas, uncovering secrets, except every discovery is a piece of filmed narrative you're piecing together alongside the gameplay. It sounds like the kind of idea that either reinvents how you think about a genre or falls apart in the prototype phase.

The concept clearly morphed along the way. What Half Mermaid is building now leans harder into the sci-fi thriller space, carrying the studio's signature approach to layered, player-driven storytelling. If you played Immortality, you know the feeling. You're not just watching something unfold, you're actively digging through it, rewinding, examining, finding threads the game trusts you to pull on your own.

That instinct to make the player an active participant rather than a passive viewer is what makes Half Mermaid's work so interesting in the broader conversation about narrative games. They keep finding ways to make you feel like you're the one doing the detective work even when the game is feeding you filmed footage frame by frame.

Precognition is targeting a spring 2028 release for PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and PC, per Gematsu. The Kinetic Publishing showcase gave us the reveal and the pedigree, but the actual shape of the game remains a mystery. Given how Immortality landed, I'm not worried about the execution. Barlow has earned the benefit of the doubt.

And I can't stop thinking about that FMV Metroid pitch. The fact that it didn't happen in that form doesn't mean the ideas are gone. They probably just found a different home inside whatever Precognition is becoming. Some of the best games come from scrapped concepts that refused to die, and this feels like one of those cases where the bones of one idea grew into something the team needed to build on its own terms.

For now, we wait. Half Mermaid doesn't rush, and that patience has served them well. If you slept on Immortality, fix that before Precognition arrives. You'll want the context for what this studio does when they're operating at full power.