Ever since Until Dawn, Supermassive Games has established itself as one of the masters of horror games. The Dark Pictures Anthology has methodically built on that narrative horror expertise with games like Man of Medan and The Devil in Me. But Directive 8020 represents an evolution for Supermassive, a bold step forward for its horror anthology — a step into cosmic and sci-fi horror.
“I’m so proud of the games we’ve done, but one thing I would do differently is spend more time. We had a vision that was insane, one every six months. We had a bunch of reasons why that was going to work, and by challenging ourselves to do it every six months, we actually did one every year,” executive producer Dan McDonald tells Inverse, “Let’s take a bit more time, give the market a chance to breathe and enjoy our games. Give ourselves a chance to get the feedback and understand the direction we want to go in.”
That new deliberate focus has allowed Supermassive to craft Directive 8020 into something that feels true to the studio’s roots, but pushes into a new direction. McDonald says Supermassive actually “chucked away” all the code from the previous Dark Pictures games, building Directive 8020 from scratch, using what the studio had learned from previous games to build something fresh — still focusing on what Supermassive has done best, like strong casting and characters.
And there are some bold swings here, with a massive flowchart system and branching storylines based on key decisions, and more direct control over exploration and movement.
In Directive 8020, the cast is led by Lashana Lynch (The Marvels, No Time to Die), who plays an astronaut who’s part of the colony ship Cassiopeia, named “Young.” Taking place in the near future, the Earth is dying in Directive 8020, and humanity is scrambling to find a new home. The Cassiopeia travels to Tau Ceti f to try and find a habitable planet, but after crashlanding, the crew realizes they may have stumbled upon something deadly — an alien organism capable of mimicking its prey stalks them onto the ship.
With that in mind, one of the major themes of Directive 8020 is trust and deception. But, on top of that, sci-fi horror is such a unique genre in how it can deliver topical themes and messages, and that’s something Supermassive has thought about.
“This is a mission about hope for our planet, and we hope our planet doesn’t get to that situation. The chance of terraforming Mars is way off, and maybe you shouldn’t be spending your money on that, you should be spending it on fixing Earth,” McDonald says, “It’s a story of opportunity, and the betterment of humanity — but being in space it’s also about isolation, trust, and aliens, when and if we encounter them, how knowable will they be? How they’re built or constructed, and how they understand the universe around them. That plays into the mistrust.”
In crafting this sci-fi story, McDonald cites films like The Thing or Event Horizon as direct inspirations, but the other key aspect of Directive 8020 is that you aren’t following a bunch of teenagers that are going to get taken out by a “slasher.” Instead, every character here is a professional who knows what they’re doing, but as McDonald says, is “going to have a bad time.”
But Suppermassive’s mission has always been to take inspirations and turn them into something unique, and that dates back to Until Dawn — a game that riffed on nearly every horror trope in the book.
“We try and take all those things and make our own version of stuff. And for every game we do we try to have real-world links and historical stuff,” McDonald says, “For this, we actually got the name from a NASA directive, based on contamination and not bringing it home. It’s hard, but you can actually find it online. We’ve got a copy of it somewhere.”
There are some bold swings in Directive 8020, both narrative and gameplay-wise. A massive flowchart system and branching storylines based on key decisions, and more direct control over exploration and movement.
A short demo I played at Summer Game Fest took us through two different sections, a kind of escape sequence and a major story choice. In the escape sequence, we had to creep through infected portions of the ship as horrific creatures stalked the walkways. This whole section felt very The Last of Us-esque, and displayed the more interactive elements of Directive 8020, where you actively have to work to get around monsters, not just through static narrative sequences. This helps create a heightened feeling of stakes and ratchets up the tension, but McDonald notes also plays into why they implement the idea of “Turning Points” and the flowchart.
“The main reason we’ve gone for turning points is the new threat in exploration. You have direct control over the character, which gives us more opportunities to kill the player. There are many more deaths, and there might be some frustration for players who want to explore more,” McDonald says, “So they can use the Turning Point system to go back just beforehand or a bit further and make a significant change that will affect an outcome. It doesn’t overwrite the progress you’ve made, so if you don’t like what you’ve done, you can carry on where you were. It’s quite progressive, and the right feature to support what we’re doing.”
The flowchart system is, in part, to help support players who want to see how every choice pans out and affects the story, and choices will stack upon each other, creating a wealth of different scenarios. The one we saw had us decide if one of the crewmates, who was acting strangely, was actually an alien in disguise. We could either eliminate the crewmate or keep him alive, and that had huge ramifications in how a future scene played out. Interestingly, that interactive flowchart is actually a visual representation of the development tool Supermassive uses.
“We focus on who the characters are and what we want their character arc to be. Once we have that, we can start building the flowchart. We have a great tool that we call the Storyboard Tool, where when we start building the game, we can build it really quickly,” McDonald says, “It looks like that flowchart, lots of little nodes you can plug in quickly. But in each node, you can put a storyboard image and you get a choice. So we can sit and play the storyboard through, multiple times, and see the different end states and how characters change from it.”
According to McDonald, this has really helped the team understand what a good choice is, and further what’s a complex and “expensive” choice for the game at large. Translating that tool directly into a tangible feature seemed like a natural progression for what Supermassive wants to achieve with Directive 8020.
In many ways, it already feels like giving more time for Directive 8020 to breathe has helped. The Dark Pictures games have each done something different, but this feels like Supermassive's boldest entry yet — both in terms of shaking up the formula and the story the studio wants to tell. But it also marks a renewed focus for the studio, where it centers each game individually instead of focusing on the Dark Pictures series as a whole.
“The mantra for us now is bigger and better. We’re not talking as much about seasons anymore. We took them out in those terms, and there’s less Dark Pictures branding now, because we really want to focus on what Directive 8020 is — we like the word anthology,” McDonald says, “Seasons, most people think they have to play the previous games, and they’re brilliant games, but you don’t need to have played any of them to enjoy the next. It still has all the great links and secrets to other games, it’s still a part of Dark Pictures, but you can come in at any point and get the full experience.”
