Director Steven Soderbergh—the man behind Magic Mike, The Knick, and this summer’s Logan Lucky—just released the trailer for his latest project. He made it with the help of HBO, but it’s not a movie or TV show. Instead, Mosaic is an interactive narrative app that will be available for free download in November. Co-written by Ed Solomon, it’s a murder mystery starring Sharon Stone that lets viewers click through a growing web of “chapters,” deciding how the homicide investigation unfolds. This isn’t a novel idea; creators have been experimenting with branching narratives for decades without garnering much popular interest. But it also might be just the right concept at just the right time: Perhaps mainstream audiences are finally ready to adventure beyond the familiarity of linear stories.

Mosaic’s marketing slogan is, “A new storytelling experience that lets you choose your own path.” But, as Soderbergh told the audience at last weekend’s Future of Storytelling Festival in New York, hearing people call it a “choose your own adventure” story makes him cringe. Sure, viewers are presented with two possible scenes following each chapter, but they can only choose the order of the scenes they watch and which character to follow, not the action in the scenes themselves. Mosaic’s is a fixed universe, viewers just get to discover it in their own way. In Soderbergh’s view, it’s more like a film than a television series, but it’s likely that, since most people will experience it on their phones, they’ll watch it in chunks like they do TV.

Soderbergh may never make another interactive story app, yet he seems certain that Mosaic is an early iteration of a form about to take off. “I referred to it as our cave painting,” he said, “because I look at it now and think, ‘Somebody’s gonna take this thing and really run with it.’” He’s probably right. Thanks to the hype around virtual reality, audiences—and studios and networks—have a newfound interest in different, and especially interactive, forms of storytelling. With Soderbergh and HBO willing to go all in on an interactive app, the probability that other experiments in entertainment will find their audience (and their funders) increases exponentially.

What those experiments will yield, though, is (ahem) another story. So far, a lot of mainstream Hollywood's adoption of interactive storytelling has come in the form of VR experiences tied to shows and films. Those things are fine for marketing, but don’t really push things forward. During Future of Storytelling, which is meant to exhibit and incubate the cutting-edge in narrative media, VR experiences for TV’s Silicon Valley and Rick and Morty drew audiences while the Mr. Robot VR experience from 2016 sat canonized inside a nearly empty “Classics” tent. The fest also featured a preview of the forthcoming Mr. Robot Alexa skill, which gives the impression that your Amazon Echo has been hacked by the show’s revolutionary cyber-gang fsociety. If anything, they demonstrated a willingness to embrace new narratives, if not a clear idea of how to do so.

What those experiments will yield, though, is another story. Much of mainstream Hollywood's adoption of interactive storytelling has come in the form of VR experiences tied to shows and films. Those things are fine for marketing, but don’t really push things forward.

“It’s not that I want the audience to decide what’s going to happen to the characters,” Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail said, referencing Soderbergh’s work with Mosaic. “But it would be amazing to have a form of storytelling where you’re continually reframing what you think is going on.”