Directive 8020 review: Two giant leaps forward, one small step back

Supermassive Games has taken its Dark Pictures anthology to space with Directive 8020, but is this latest standalone experience in this choice-laden horror series worth playing?

In brief, yes, we’d argue that Directive 8020 is well worth checking out if you’re a fan of previous Supermassive titles like Until Dawn and The Quarry, especially if you’re also into sci-fi horror movies like Alien and The Thing.

As is usually the case with the Dark Pictures series, Supermassive has splurged its budget on one big screen star, with Bond alum and The Day of the Jackal star Lashana Lynch playing a key member of the crew that you’re controlling.

Lynch does a great job anchoring the plot, leading a diverse cast through a twisty narrative that sees the spaceship Cassiopeia being boarded by a hostile alien entity. This ‘substance’ has a knack for disguising itself as a human… until its bulging gooey purple innards start forcing their way out in gruesome fashion.

When I spoke to the developers at the Gamescom conference last year, they were keen to highlight two new features that fans of this anthology series will have to reckon with for better or worse.

One of these major new additions is Realtime Threats (the monsters will hunt you down in tense stealth segments where your life is on the line) and the other big change is the Turning Point system (you can now go back through scenes at your will to replay crucial choices and take another stab at failed life-or-death moments).

These two changes represent a pair of huge leaps forward for this plucky little franchise, but each of them comes with somewhat frustrating wrinkles, making it something of a 'two steps forward, one step back' scenario.

With the Realtime Threats, there’s no denying that these moments really ratchet up the tension and get your blood pumping. Depending on which difficulty options you choose, you may only get away with one stealth blunder before your character is brutally murdered on your second failed sneak.

However, a lot of these gameplay segments feel very samey. I can’t remember the last game that had me crouching behind a crate quite this much, simply waiting for the monster to wander off in a different direction. Towards the end, broken glass on the floor does complicate things, but the repetition of the format does get a bit dull as you push through the eight chapters of the story.

The Turning Point system feels like a 'be careful what you wish for' situation. Fans of this series, me included, have long wanted an easier way to tweak their decisions and see different outcomes without having to finish the whole game and then start replaying whole chapters. On the promise of making life easier for you, Supermassive has absolutely delivered.

However, I did find that the very existence of the Turning Point system did somewhat take me out of the game. Every time something went wrong, I started second-guessing myself with an anxious internal dialogue - should I go back and change that choice? What will the consequences be if I do?

As I got further and further into the game, I started to feel a weight of responsibility that wasn’t very fun. It started to feel like, if the eight episodes of Directive 8020 are essentially a playable TV show, I was the guy in the editing booth deciding which scenes are good, which bits need reshooting, and which characters we wanted to cut or keep.

Eventually, I had to force myself to forget about the Turning Point system, otherwise my initial instincts in the gameplay and the cut-scenes were essentially pointless. Part of the fun of these games is testing your mettle against everything that comes at you, and you lose that if you’re constantly rewinding and trying to save everyone. The stakes have to mean something or it becomes less of an engaging story.

Once I’d come to terms with that and stopped tinkering so much with the timeline, I had a great time with Directive 8020.

The game does a great job of building tension and unsettling vibes, with the graphics and the sound design being noticeably high quality.

The cast are all really strong, the story has some epic twists, and there’s even some banging music to be heard over the end credits of each episode (shout out to whomever on the crew clearly loves Blood Red Shoes).

Now that I’ve finished my initial playthrough, with a few crew members lost along the way, I will allow myself to have a bit more fun with the Turning Points, especially as there are Dark Pictures Easter eggs waiting to be found.

Now that Supermassive has taken these giant leaps forward, it’ll be very interesting to see where the Dark Pictures series goes next.

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