Sci-fi and horror are a combination we see often, and that’s especially true in the video game medium. This includes iconic games like Dead Space, Alien: Isolation, and even Prey. Developer Supermassive Games is no stranger to the horror genre, with its most popular game being Until Dawn. During Summer Game Fest: Play Days, I had the opportunity to go hands-on with the next chapter in Supermassive Games’ anthology series, The Dark Pictures: Directive 8020.
Directive 8020 is many firsts for Supermassive. The game takes place in a world where Earth is dying and humanity is on the brink of extinction. You play as Young, played by Lashana Lynch, who is an astronaut seeking a new planet aboard the Cassiopeia ship. Aboard the ship, things don’t go as planned, and the crew crashes onto the planet Tau Ceti f. It’s here where things take a turn for the worse: an existential alien threat capable of mimicking anything begins to hunt down the crew, and they must fight for the survival of humanity.
My preview of the game began in a room where the alien mimicked a crew member and began attacking the humans. I took control of an astronaut and had to creep around the ship to avoid it and make an escape. This segment reminded me of an encounter in Resident Evil, though much more grounded, as the mimic followed a set path. You have the choice to crouch around and make minimal noise with a compromise to your movement speed, or pick up the pace and alert the alien to your location. I happened to find an interactive battery in the environment that activated a siren to attract the mimic (apparently, I was one of the very few who did), and I was told you can expect to see things like this throughout the game.
After this sequence, I was presented with a big focus of Directive 8020: turning points and the rewind feature. Supermassive Games has created what almost reminds me of a visual novel flowchart that allows you to go back and instantly ‘rewind’ to a turning point (decision) and choose another option. In the past, players were required to play through the entire game to choose another choice, but that isn’t the case here. This streamlined process is really quite excellent, and I think many fans will greatly appreciate the ease of use here.
In addition to some hands-on time with the game, we also got to speak with Supermassive Games about the inspiration behind Directive 8020 and the new rewind features of branching pathways.
What was the team’s big inspiration behind Directive 8020? The idea of trusting no one is a very exciting take on horror.
So the key thing there is — and we’ve talked about this a lot in the past — this is our version of The Thing in space. You know, that fantastic John Carpenter movie with Kurt Russell, and even the more recent ones, too, where there’s this horrific alien creature that can mimic you. It can change shape. It can become you. And that just puts so much paranoia and fear into the players.
That was the first big thing for us. We’ve been looking at movies like Event Horizon with its body horror, and of course, the Alien series, and a whole bunch of other sci-fi films. But you know, with the series of games we’ve been making, we always knew we were going to go to space.
When we started, we had the first four games planned out in a lot of detail, and then the next four at a higher level. We always knew Directive 8020 was going to be one of them; we knew we’d make that shift. It’s a chance for us to do a really different kind of horror. They’re thousands of light years from Earth, totally isolated, no help coming. They’ve got to deal with it on their own.
And that paranoia you mentioned, with the mimic and all that feeding into the isolation, that’s key. These are not a bunch of teenagers in the woods, right? They’re a professional crew of astronauts. They should be a lot more unflappable, but they’re facing a really bad situation. So yeah, we can really try and scare the crap out of them. It’s a lot of fun.
Obviously, a big focus of the game is the branching paths. How long can players expect the game to be? And how many different choices will they encounter in each chapter?
The amount of choices is ridiculous in all of our games, and I think the turning points really help players see and explore that. This is the biggest game we’ve done so far in The Dark Pictures. You’ve seen the new gameplay — it’s a bit of a new direction for us. Stealth, for example, you can approach that in a bunch of different ways. You can try to stealth it out and figure out where it’s going to move. You can attract it with your torch. You can try and fight it off, but you won’t beat it; it’s a lot stronger than you. However, you can still try to fight it off and get away. Or you can distract it using parts of the ship — little robots, power systems, screens, stuff like that. And that really changes the game and extends the playtime.
But we don’t want to scare off our original fans. All the branching narrative and cinematic elements that look, feel, and play like a movie, that’s all still there. If you don’t want to engage with the new stuff, you can change the settings to make it easier, even to the point where you cannot be killed, if that’s how you want to play. And yeah, we’ve added loads of puzzle mechanics and all kinds of new stuff to give the game more breadth and diversity. So it really is the biggest one we’ve done yet.
Also, with the turning points, we know our fans play through many times, up to 12 times or so, to see all the major endings. That often meant starting the game over from the beginning. If you messed up a QTE or an action point, you were locked into that choice because we save right after it. You can’t be quick enough to turn your console off to stop it from saving! So we wanted to support our fans. They’ve given us their love, their money, their attention — let’s enable them to play it and get to those new bits of content, the really fun stuff. Some fans only play through once, and that’s their story. But this will encourage them to go back and experience those other paths.
And I’m really lucky! I get to go on set with these fantastic actors like Lashana Lynch and others. I see them in tears, crying their eyes out during performances, or screaming, or laughing. If you only play one path, you might not see all that good stuff. So the turning points let you get to that easily. It’s kind of like back in the day when you’d get a DVD, and at the end you’d go straight to the deleted scenes to see the other cool stuff.
Directive 8020 is set to release on October 2 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.
