2 Heroes Reborn Games Will Act as Prequels to the Show - IGN (2025)

The two games act as a prequel to Heroes Reborn and share an overarching story by two writers on the show, overseen by Heroes creator Tim Kring. Key characters and plots will link the two games, so while you can play them separately, Heroes lovers can play both to get a richer experience.

Heroes Reborn: Gemini will be available on consoles and PC and is a first-person action-adventure game where the player controls new character Cassandra, age 20, who uses localized time-travel powers and telekinesis to solve puzzles and defeat enemies. In a gameplay video, we saw her exploring an abandoned facility and come across a locked door. She used her power to peer into the past to read a piece of paper with a code, which she used in the present to unlock the door. We also saw her lift up a piece of debris, travel to the past with it, and then hurl it at an enemy to knock them out.

“There are a lot of games that come out these days where they have a key mobile app that kind of tags onto the game in a minor way, and that's not the case here,” game designer Brad Santos told us in an interview. “Our mobile game, Enigma, is a very strong, standalone product that tells its own story and is really a complete experience in itself. But also, it ties back nicely to our core game, which is Gemini, and the TV series."

A full trailer for the games will be unveiled on Sunday, July 12th at NBC’s Heroes panel at San Diego Comic-Con.

For full details on the development of the game and what to expect, check out our interview with Kring, Santos, and Imperative’s Zak Kadison on the next page.

Here's our full interview with Heroes creator Tim Kring, game designer Brad Santos and Imperative Entertainment's Zak Kadison.

IGN: With the new Heroes Reborn miniseries headed to TV, what made you want to launch two games alongside it?

Tim Kring: I had always been interested in doing a game in the Heroes universe. But back when we did this show the first time, the world was very different. That was almost nine years ago. The game world was very different, and mobile was not really a possibility at the time. You know, smartphones -- the iPhone literally launched when we were watching the first season of Heroes -- everything was pretty nascent and took a long time. I didn't want to try to stumble my way into something that was not a high enough quality. So getting to do this relaunch of the show seemed like the perfect time to try to launch games with it.

And the bigger issue, for me -- and this might just be a theme we hit a couple of times in this interview -- is that I have always seen Heroes as a universe of content, not just a television show. It certainly centered around the television show, but I don't know if you're aware of what we did the first time around with the Heroes 360-degree universe, and the fans could find content. It had online content, mobile content, published content, comic books and novels. So I became really fascinated with the idea of multi-platform storytelling, where a piece of the story lives in all these different platforms, and you as a Heroes fan could be inside this universe where you get this content in all these different places. And each story was unique to the platform we were telling the story on. So it created this mythology-driven world that you had access to from all these multiple places. So I see the games as just another way of creating narrative that helps fill out that Heroes universe.

Brad Santos: As Tim was saying, we knew what the mobile gaming audience and the traditional console gaming audience were; they had some overlap, but they were also different in some ways. We wanted to find a cool way to bring them together, by bringing out a couple of game products that are connected in their cool and interesting ways with one another and with the TV series.

One thing that I'd like to stress is that our mobile game is not a companion app. There are a lot of games that come out these days where they have a key mobile app that kind of tags onto the game in a minor way, and that's not the case here. Our mobile game, Enigma, is a very strong, standalone product that tells its own story and is really a complete experience in itself. But also, it ties back nicely to our core game, which is Gemini, and the TV series.

IGN: What will be the connective tissue between these two games and the show? Will characters in the game show up in the TV series or vice versa?

Kring: Yeah, the main character that we actually tell the backstory of in the game migrates onto the show itself. So I think for anybody who is playing the game, they're going to have this huge experience when they see that character depicted on the television show. So that's a unique situation. Again -- and to sort of get back to the first question -- a lot of times the gaming community and demographic or whatever you want to call it are not always fans of your television show. So this is a way to cross-pollinate between the two, to have people who watch the show hear about the game and want to find out more about the story until they go out and get these games. And vice versa, people who play the games will be aware that these characters migrate onto the show, and that might actually cause them to want to watch the show.

Santos: Yeah, I think Tim brought up the main point, that the characters are a strong part of this, but the games are firmly rooted in the universe that Tim's created in many different ways: locations, mythology -- and I think for people who are very curious fans of the Heroes Reborn universe, there's a lot there, a lot to uncover. There's a lot of suspense and mystery throughout it, and there are hidden secrets. For those fans who are looking for that material, they will be rewarded by learning new things about the characters and places that they've loved in the series.

IGN: Headed into the new show, the big question is, what happened between the Season 4 finale of Heroes and the beginning of Heroes Reborn? We've seen the teasers with the graffiti -- "Where are the heroes?" and we know the heroes are being hunted. Will we learn more about that in-between time in the games?

Kring: In a very general sense you will, yes. The specifics are going to be reserved for the storytelling of the more traditional narrative, but yes, that's part of it, to ensure that was a flow of continuity between the two. Two of the writers on the show in the writers room actually wrote the script for the game itself. So the writers room for the show really was kind of an incubator for the story in the game.

IGN: When I first heard about these games, I thought it would cool to finally get some Heroes games, but I also didn't know what to expect from the game play. Because when you play a Spider-Man game, you know you're going to be swinging around on webs, and when you play Batman, you're going to throw Batarangs and tie up criminals. But with Heroes, there's not only a wide array of powers but also the story is more about the character drama. So what will we be able to do in the game?

Santos: I think the core fantasy of Heroes that had appealed to so many people around the world was this fantasy fulfillment or the idea of an ordinary person who discovers within themselves extraordinary powers. They go through that experience of becoming something more and engaging in an epic struggle and kind of live that fantasy. That's really at the core of the experience in both our games.

Our heroines are two young girls -- sisters, actually. In the mobile game it follows the story of Dalia, one of the sisters, and in the console game we're following the story of Cassandra, the other sister. In both stories, these girls are discovering powers within themselves, and we as players get to evolve and learn to use those powers in a variety of ways. The mobile game is focused primarily on puzzle-solving -- sort of environmental brain teasers. It's sort of like an escape sequence almost, where we're moving through this complex environment using the combination of your wits and your newly awakened powers to overcome obstacles and eventually make your way to freedom. In the mobile game, it's the opposite experience, where you're delving deeper into this mystery and into this dangerous, mysterious place and sort of fighting your way in to get to the core of this mystery to bring these two sisters together.

So in the console game, you have more traditional action-oriented combat and life-threatening situations, and that's structured along the same lines of what action-adventure games are these days.

Whereas the mobile game is a series of bite-sized chunks of gameplay more suitable for a mobile audience who just want to pick it up and play for, say, 20 minutes. So something along the lines of maybe Monument Valley or something, but more sophisticated in a much more immersive environment -- you know, the Unreal 4, photorealistic, first-person perspective -- and that's a different style of gameplay.

IGN: For the console game, I saw a bit of footage for that, and it looked like the character had time-travel powers to solve puzzles.

Santos: Yeah. In fact, we're particularly proud of our time-manipulation mechanics. It's unlike any sort of time travel you've seen in a movie or game before. The sisters share sort of a unique selection of abilities to allow them to manipulate time in interesting ways. One of those functions is that you can view the past or the future, and then they can shift between those two environments. So for every location that you see in both games, it exists in two states, in two different times essentially.

So, for example, you might have a desolate, ruined structure, which then shifts and you see this pristine structure. It's the same layout, but now it's fully inhabited and operational and the lights are on. So there's this really cool time-lapse visual effect, and many of them are puzzle situations -- kind of our gameplay challenges -- that are based around this concept of having to move through two different time periods in order to solve a series of obstacles or to survive whatever situation.

Kring: And without giving too much away from Heroes Reborn, this was inspired by this idea of the past we're kind of unpacking in Heroes Reborn, where events of the past get explored in a kind of time travel-y way, as is only done on Heroes in a complicated way. So some of that inspired this idea of how to build the mechanics for this idea of time travel and time shifting in the game.

IGN: Just to clarify, you said both sisters have time travel powers, right?

Santos: They have similar powers -- very similar -- but I think we want to be a little mysterious there. I'd like the players to discover what their capabilities actually are. But yeah, as you know, time travel can be problematic for storytelling. So we're using our time travel, I would say, in a very limited way, a very structured way. But once the players learn the rules of how it works, it becomes this really fun game mechanic that can be applied in all sorts of different, interesting, creative ways. So many of these situations can be resolved using more than one method. So I look forward to watching players try different tricks and use the time-shifting mechanics.

Kring: Also, just getting to be visually inside of the same kind of setting before and after is really clever and unique. I had never seen that before in a game.

IGN: It's also of note that the mobile game is utilizing Unreal 4 engine.

Kring: It really is beautiful. The mobile game is just stunning for a mobile game. Brad, in terms of the Unreal Engine, that's a brand new thing for mobile, right?

Santos: Yeah, I sort of have to restrain my enthusiasm, because it might sound outrageous, but I think we certainly have one of the best-looking mobile games that you're likely to see any time soon or have seen. It's largely due to Unreal 4 and the technology we're using, but also the great artists at Phosphor, who have created this memorable and immersive world that has a real strong sense of place and has a history to it that is reflected in little details -- graffiti on walls and things that you pick up. It's also totally voiced, which is rare in a mobile game, where it's professionally acted, written by the Heroes writers. So very high production values.

And the console game kind of expands that. Both games are set in the same location, but it's a very large place, and we're seeing different aspects of it in the two games. So if you've played both of the two games, you'll have a much better sense of the whole picture and the whole story of what has happened in this one location known as the Quarry.

IGN: Gemini and Enigma -- can you give any hints about what those titles mean?

Santos: Yes, the meaning of those titles will become more clear when the games are played. It's part of the mystery we don't want to reveal yet, but Enigma is a reference in one sense to the nature of the gameplay, which is all about these brain-teasing puzzles that you have to solve in order to escape. Gemini is a reference to part of the underlying mythology.

IGN: In these games, who are the enemies?

Santos: Again, this is something where we're trying to keep the details a little bit secretive, but there's certainly a tie-in to what Tim has created for the new Heroes Reborn series, and I don't want to get too deep into it, but he's created some really interesting, new adversarial characters, and those factions have a presence in our games.

Kring: Yeah, you will recognize the enemy in the games as being tied to the one in Heroes Reborn. That's part of the connection.

Santos: One thing I can say is that the people involved are familiar with evolved humans and the threat that they pose, and they have developed tactics and technology specifically designed to counter super-powered people like our heroes. So we have some very interesting conflicts. It's not just security guards with guns. It's a much more challenging and complex type of fighting that you get into.

Kring: Just to clarify that a little bit, we've announced a little bit of what Heroes Reborn is about, so I can say this. Heroes Reborn drops in five years after the show ended, five years after these powers have been outed by the cheerleader Claire Bennett, who in the final moments of the TV series outed herself to the world. Before that, the show existed with all of the characters hiding their powers and the world not knowing about them. So when we start our show five years later, the world now knows about people with powers, and human nature being what it is, the world has kind of rejected the idea of people with powers. These people are now persecuted and hunted and wanted. So some of what the games do is unpack a little bit of how and why that has happened in the intervening time.

IGN: Were there any other games that inspired you during game design?

Santos: Portal is one of our inspirations, certainly for the mobile game in particular -- although it's more about the conceptual similarity rather than the mechanical, which is how the gameplay actually works. It's kind of that idea of a gradually expanding environment where each room, area, is its own puzzle. Rather than moving little objects on a checkerboard, the whole room is a checkerboard. You kind of have to reconfigure the space and the furniture to create new pathways as you move along. So that's definitely part of it. As far as the console game, I would think BioShock would be a good example -- although our game is less combat-oriented -- but there is that kind of survival, tense, constant struggle for survival as you're moving through and using a combination superpowers and first-person navigation. So yeah, that would be a good example.

Kadison: Of the inspiration, for the gameplay and the mechanics. BioShock is a great example, but just as a point of clarity, this is by no means as lengthy an experience, narratively, as BioShock was.