Supermassive Games has already proven itself as one of the most popular storytellers in interactive cinematic horror–since Until Dawn’s release a decade ago, more than half a dozen similar titles that focus on different monsters have been released. Directive 8020 is the latest of these as part of its anthology series The Dark Pictures, and sees the developer charting new territory in space.
Alien is one major cornerstone, the film that really showed us how terrifying space can be, while you also play as a crew on board the ship Casseopeia who are due to awake from cryosleep. There’s even a touch of 2001: A Space Odyssey, given the presence of a talking supercomputer called Oracle, though playing through the first episode, I don’t have enough reason to be suspicious. The grave threat instead is a meteorite that’s breached the ship’s hull, which has also brought some kind of alien fleshy matter on board that can mimic the appearance of the crew. This is essentially The Thing in space.
While that will no doubt open up to paranoia among the crew when you’re going to question who is or isn’t human, at this point the ship only has two monitoring crew up and about, Tomas Carter and Sims, so when the latter suddenly starts behaving murderously aggressive, it’s no surprise that something’s not right.
The formula for Supermassive’s interactive horror typically involves making choices and reacting to quicktime events, with the occasionally awkward moments of actually controlling a character in third-person. But given that there are times you’re going to be hunted, creative director Will Doyle explains that this has meant that Directive 8020’s control systems couldn’t just follow on from its past Dark Pictures titles.
“The way the character moves, and the way the camera works [has been] rebuilt from the ground up, and that’s to support some of the stealth gameplay that we’ve put in,” he explains. “We’ve got these real-time threats, who will hunt you down and kill you. So that complete overhaul is new to this game.”
At the same time, a more traditional third-person adventure format also allows for more exploration and puzzles, as you can turn on a flashlight to navigate the creepy, dark corridors of the ship, and also have a scanner that’s used for interacting with certain objects. I’m not fully convinced that these sections of gameplay will prove enjoyable–when I play a cinematic horror game, it just feels plodding to be walking around and handling very mundane interactions that any good film editor would have left on the cutting-room floor. It also doesn’t help that the build I played also had some awkward moments when the prompt wouldn’t come up if you were standing too close to an object–a bug the team had already warned me about in advance.
Nonetheless, Doyle insists that this is intentional in the game’s design philosophy. “A lot of traditional action-adventure games have these design loops where you’re getting ammunition, and we see story as the reward in those loops,” he explains. “We have a load of stuff hidden around the world, but they’re advancing the story all the time. So within our discovery sections, where you’re moving around in control of your character, as well as evading threats, you’re also unraveling pieces of this mystery, so the story gets driven throughout.”
However, the new mechanic that intrigues me the most is Turning Points, which essentially breaks down every narrative decision into a story beat that you can not only chart on a menu screen but also return to. In past games, when a decision occurs or a character dies, the story continues and there’s no way to undo it. While this way of playing the game still remains in Survivor mode for those who want to live and die by their decisions, I also wondered if the ability to rewind is due to there being more direct character control that can lead to potentially more frustrating mistakes, especially for a more casual audience not used to playing with a controller.
Doyle recalls that there have been players of the studio’s past games who have actually stopped playing when a favorite character died because they couldn’t be bothered with trying again. And while he admits that Turning Points alleviate this frustration, and helps make the game more approachable for a player worried about their skill level, he says the mechanic is really there to enhance the game for narrative-focused players. Meanwhile, a range of accessibility settings also allow you to effectively reduce the enemy AI to a ghost-themed train ride, where they may be scary but won’t ever catch or kill you.
“[Turning Points are] a save system, but within each individual beat, you can go back to characters who are alive or dead based on decisions made,” he explains. “If you rewind to a decision point, you can explore different paths. You can pass anywhere you’ve been in the story. So when you see the [narrative] tree, you can explore all the way down on the tree. We want people to play the game however they want to play.”
So rather than a rewind mechanic like say, Max’s power in Life Is Strange, it’s actually better to think of Turning Points as more like a fast-travel system in a narrative game, and a more elegant way to explore different decision paths than save-scumming.
“You can rewind all the way back as far as you want to go, so even at the end of the game, I can jump right back to any point,” Doyle adds, and it’s here that the system feels like it’s going to be the most beneficial for both completionists who want to comb through every secret or piece of content in the game without having to replay from start to finish. Think of it like being able to skip to any chapter of a DVD, but a lot more interactive. “For [Trophy/Achievement] hunters, there’s still a challenge to seeing everything, but the Turning Points [allow] you to whizz back to where you need to get to make those changes. And that’s kind of the magic of what we do.”
Directive 8020 releases for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S in 2026.