During the resurgence of the adventure genre in the early 2010’s, developer Supermassive Games surprised the world with the release of their ode to slasher horror movies, Until Dawn in 2015. Salvaging the remnants of a project originally built around the PlayStation Move technology, Supermassive Games retooled their game to resemble the choice-based, interactive, narrative works of developer Quantic Dream into something that took the formula to the next level. It was a perfect embracing of horror camp, and ‘til this day, experiencing Until Dawn with a group of friends as we all made life and death choices remains a gaming highlight.
Supermassive Games realized they had something with Until Dawn and doubled down on their formula with The Dark Pictures Anthology. Unfortunately, with some exceptions like 2021’s House of Ashes, the games released under this banner tried hard to catch lightning twice in a bottle for what worked with Until Dawn, and ended up being lesser than the sum of their parts.
Which brings us to Directive 8020, originally conceived as the start of the second season of The Dark Pictures Anthology as teased by the end of The Devil in Me, before entering an extended development cycle that retooled the gameplay, brought the tech to Unreal Engine 5, and downplayed the connections to the anthology, to present a more standalone game in an intriguing space setting. In this context, is this the game that fixes what ailed the anthology entries and recaptures the magic from Supermassive Games’ classic horror game, or does it continue living in the shadow of their progenitor?
Not So Doppelganger
The conceit of Directive 8020 will remind you a bit from horror space classic Alien. You step into the shoes of the crew of the colony ship Cassiopeia as they are sent on a mission to find a future place for humanity beyond a dying Earth. Their destination leads them to the Neptune moon of Tau Ceti f. After their mission goes wrong, the crew discovers they are not alone with the discovery of an alien organism who’s capable of perfectly mimicking human beings to a perfect degree, pitting them with a shroud of doubt as they try to escape unscathed from a situation they don’t know who they can or cannot trust.
I can’t imagine a better setup for Supermassive’s style of game. Theoretically, taking a page from Alien, the quintessential “monster picks off crew members one by one” template, and putting it in a game where your decision making determines the crew survival, should have been the shot in the arm needed to bring back the thrills missing from The Dark Pictures Anthology. Unfortunately, it pains me to say some choices made don’t take full advantage of this easy slam dunk premise.
I’ll say it right off the bat: the characters in Directive 8020 suck. They truly do. Even for Supermassive’s standard where they usually paint their characters in broad stereotype brushes than fully formed characters, the crew in Directive 8020 are so generic. Having finished the game, I can’t even remember the names without having to look them up, or even remember what made each of them special or distinctive despite the story giving them a defined crew role. Despite the early parts where you give them defining characteristics based on your choice answers, in the end I felt that was just set dressing to how everything started playing out, and they made zero impression for me to feel invested in their survival (which is ironic, considering I finished the game with all playable characters alive in my first playthrough).
Even though I’m not gonna lie and say I can quote and remember all the cast members from the first Alien movie, the personalities of that crew were distinct enough so when they got killed, it at least made an impression. Directive 8020 unfortunately misses on that spark, and I feel it damages the game by quite a bit (I tested that by replaying parts and having some characters die, and I felt nothing). And the less said about a late story twist that paints these characters in a completely different light, the better.
This extends beyond the general generic nature of the characters as well. Considering the alien threat in this game is supposed to be a shape shifting alien organism, the game should have 100% upped the tension and gaslit you as a player to constantly keep you guessing what was real and what was not, thus making your decisions more difficult as a result.
Unfortunately, the story structure that constantly flashes forward to a few hours from your present whereabouts undermines the tension by constantly presenting things yet to happen, diluting any sense of reasonable doubt. And dare I say, I think there were only two times that the game presented me with a choice that could have gone either way because of the shape shifting conceit. The game needed ten times more of these kinds of choices to feel like it took advantage of its conceit. Instead, the crew survival hinges more on you really not paying attention, and failing in the gameplay sections of Directive 8020.
Not Curated
Compared to previous The Dark Pictures Anthology games, Directive 8020 actually plays more fully like a traditional over the shoulder third person adventure, a direction Supermassive has slowly been inching towards when seeing their last few games The Quarry and The Devil in Me. This evolution makes the walking gameplay a bit more important than before, because there is a chance you can get your characters killed while exploring, rather than merely making the wrong choices or missing a quicktime event (where there seem to be fewer than usual for a Supermassive game).
Beyond having more chances to explore your environments, gather collectibles, and sometimes solve the odd environmental puzzle here and there, (which are simple to the point of just being annoying stop gaps) a lot of the gameplay segments have you engaging with pretty basic stealth gameplay as you evade the shape shifting alien which typically stays on set paths through the environments. The alien is really easy to evade as long as you are paying attention. And if you get caught, on the game’s Normal “Challenging” difficulty you have the chance to escape the alien via a quicktime event.
Unless there are two aliens within the environment, the quicktime event actually breaks the stealth tension for me, because the quicktime event is tied to an item that recharges after usage, and the alien is stunned for long enough for you to use it again. Reading that the Hard difficulty actually disables that quick time event, I actually recommend playing on that difficulty because it’s one of the reasons, alongside how predictable the choices felt, that I was able to complete my first playthrough with my entire crew surviving. To me, it’s asinine for a Supermassive game to have all the characters survive on my initial playthrough.
Turning Point
The game also includes a system called Turning Points, which works similarly to how Quantic Dream’s Detroit Become Human presents the ways the story could branch out. At a moments notice, it would give a visual to where you could veer off narratively on a subsequent playthrough.
In Directive 8020, though, you have access to this menu all the time, and unless you specifically disable it, it gives you the chance to rewind any given choice at any point which can feel like cheating compared to the blind playthroughs of the previous games. I’ve always liked having visual references to understand how different choices can make subsequent playthroughs worth it for something different, but I like them as an option looking back, not available all the time from moment one. I do like how it can make chapter selection more granular to go back to very specific choices, and it’s the way I was able to see character deaths since my first playthrough actually went down without a hitch.
As for the game’s connection to The Dark Pictures Anthology, it is interesting to remember how this game was originally planned as the start of the planned second season of the anthology. Over time it grew to become a more standalone game where the connections to the other games, which were more subtle, are now more extraneous to the point I didn’t recognize anything. And that’s beyond excluding things like The Curator and how the choice menu was shared between all the games, where the way you make choices here is more in line with Until Dawn’s two choices. While I’m of the opinion that The Dark Pictures Anthology has not achieved greatness beyond a few spots, making Directive 8020 not directly connect does give it a clean break. It’s just unfortunate the clean break and the additions didn’t work out completely. And as much as I didn’t care at all about the characters, the performances were convincing enough. It’s just too bad the writing let it all down.
At least it presents well. The extra development time allowed Supermassive time to upgrade the technology behind the game, and Directive 8020 is an appropriate looker most of the time. While I feel the game’s look can be overly sterile with the dark blue hues, it looks great when more alien-y aesthetics make their way in, and the character models at least in the cut-scenes do look fantastic. Playing on the PS5 Pro it looked beautiful and ran smoothly though I can confirm it looks slightly muddier on the base PS5 version.
As a big fan of Until Dawn that has been mostly underwhelmed by the studio’s output in recent times beyond House of Ashes, I truly hoped that the extra time Supermassive Games took to flesh out this horror space entry would have been the game that finally felt like a true return to form for the studio.
Which is what makes it all the more disappointing how such a great setup and idea has gone so unrealized by its poor characters, and fumbling what should have been a tense, choice-based adventure. Even with interesting additions like more realized moment to moment gameplay couldn’t make up for the things the entire package fumbles. While I think it’s better than some of their recent games, I’m still waiting for their return to greatness.
Thank you to our PR partners and Supermassive Games for review access to Directive 8020. You can find Seasoned Gaming’s review policy here.