While Directive 8020 marks the fifth entry in developer Supermassive’s Dark Pictures Anthology, it also has the distinction of being the first title in the second season. In fitting fashion, it also brings along some new changes, some of which may surprise longtime fans who’ve poured over every decision and branching path from previous games.
“Directive 8020 is what we like to call a narrative survival horror,” explains Will Doyle, creative director at Supermassive Games. “So, it’s a narrative game. It’s a branching storyline where your choices determine the outcome of the story. You’ll control multiple characters across the course of the game, switching between them in different scenes. And, it’s a survival horror; for the first time in the Dark Pictures series, we are putting you up against real-time threats. So, there’s moments where you’ll come across monsters that are trying to hunt you down and kill you, and if they catch you, they’ll rip your face off.”
This might seem like a minor change, but these real-time sections — which, at first glance, seem like an odd inclusion for a series that built its name off of cinematic cutscenes that dynamically unfold through a player’s dialogue choices — work quite well within the established formula. During our brief hands-on session with Directive 8020, we played through one of these moments for ourselves, wherein one of the crew members of the colony ship Cassiopeia is being hunted by a monstrous creature that, to add insult to injury, can also morph into his doppelgänger. After narrowly escaping an untimely death and reuniting with the rest of our crew, we were presented with another critical decision: whether or not to kill the man funding the Cassiopeia’s voyage, all because of the off-chance he’s actually been replaced by one of the aforementioned monstrous doppelgängers.
Having only played 20 or so minutes of Directive 8020, there’s still a ton to unpack — we still don’t know much about the game’s main character, played by Lashana Lynch, and how she ended up taking on the role of piloting the Cassiopeia — but we did get a few more details from Will Doyle himself.
“So in this story, which is kind of set in the near future, Earth is dying. Humanity is looking for a new home world, somewhere new to colonize. They discover a candidate planet, Tau Ceti f, and they send a ship out to colonize this place. But ahead of that, they do a kind of dry run, and they send another ship out to do everything that a colony ship would do, apart from actually landing and setting up a colony. You play the crew of that ship. Of course, it being a Supermassive Games title, things go wrong. They get hit by a meteorite, and an alien presence infiltrates their ship. So, you’re going to go up against that in this game. You’re going to go up against a monster that can shape shift and can infiltrate your crew and try to bring you down from within.”
There are plenty of mysteries to solve aboard the Cassiopeia, but thankfully, we won’t have to wait too long to solve them for ourselves. Directive 8020 is set to release on October 2, 2025, for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.
