Directive 8020

Supermassive Games has spent the last decade refining cinematic choose-your-own-adventure horror. Since Until Dawn exploded onto the scene back in 2015, the studio has carved out a niche almost entirely of its own, blending branching narratives, gruesome deaths, and high-pressure decision-making into one consistently entertaining formula.
And now we have Directive 8020, quite possibly the biggest and most ambitious Dark Pictures title to date. Another deeply connected “pick your choice, seal your fate” kind of deal, complete with famous faces, horrifying deaths, and those moments of regret where you immediately realise you picked the wrong dialogue option.

Directive 8020 does very little to evolve Supermassive’s formula in meaningful new ways, but what it does offer is a slick, polished, and confident refinement of what already works. Familiar? Absolutely. But sometimes familiar works for a reason.

What is Directive 8020?

The Dark Pictures Anthology has always been a fun excuse for Supermassive Games to experiment with different horror settings and inspirations. While each game shares small references and connective tissue with the wider anthology, every story remains self-contained, with its own cast, themes, and looming threat.

Directive 8020 takes the anthology into full sci-fi horror territory. Set in a future where Earth is rapidly collapsing, humanity pins its hopes on a newly discovered planet several years away from home. Naturally, things go catastrophically wrong almost immediately.

While the crew remain in deep stasis during the journey, something crashes aboard the ship. The small awake maintenance team investigates, quickly realising something is deeply wrong. By the time the rest of the crew awaken, paranoia, distrust, and grotesque alien horrors have already begun spreading throughout the vessel.

Like previous Dark Pictures entries, you’ll explore environments, solve light puzzles, uncover secrets, build relationships between characters, and most importantly, make critical decisions that can drastically alter the course of events.


In Space… No One Can See You Make the Wrong Choice

Directive 8020 will feel instantly familiar to anyone who has played previous Dark Pictures games. The episodic pacing, the cast of recognisable actors, the spooky shenanigans, and, of course, the constant decision-making that could lead to devastating outcomes are all present and accounted for.

I’ve always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the writing in Supermassive games. Clearly, the studio understands pacing, escalation, and how to construct branching narratives filled with consequences, but character writing can sometimes feel inconsistent.

Thankfully, the pacing in Directive 8020 is some of the best the anthology has seen so far. Unlike several previous entries, the game avoids a painfully slow opening and instead escalates surprisingly quickly. Tension, danger, and major decisions arrive early, which makes repeat playthroughs far easier to revisit.

That faster pacing works especially well alongside the game’s increasingly complex branching structure. By the midpoint, the web of decisions and consequences had already expanded into a surprisingly complicated beast, making me genuinely excited to replay the story and see how wildly different things could become.

Where the writing falls short, however, is with the crew themselves. While the performances are generally solid, the characters rarely feel fully developed beyond their core archetypes. There are hints of stronger characterisation buried throughout the story, but they rarely evolve into relationships that feel meaningful.

Previous Supermassive games thrived on messy relationships, rivalries, romance, distrust, and emotional baggage. Until Dawn in particular succeeded because its characters constantly bounced off one another in entertaining ways. Directive 8020’s cast, by comparison, often feel more like coworkers than deeply connected people.

There are still some compelling ideas here. The lead astronaut attempting to live up to her father’s legacy, friendships strained under pressure, and growing paranoia aboard the ship all provide strong foundations. Unfortunately, many of those ideas never fully evolve into something emotionally gripping.

Even after two full playthroughs, the crew still felt oddly distant compared to previous Supermassive casts. Even with Lashana Lynch, who I generally love in most of her works, just didn’t resonate with me or most of the supporting cast in a meaningful way.

The presentation overall is excellent. Directive 8020 boasts impressive graphical fidelity, strong environmental design, and a soundtrack that does a fantastic job building tension.

The visual contrast between the sterile sci-fi interiors and the grotesque organic horror spreading across the ship works especially well. Watching the clean futuristic environments slowly become consumed by fleshy alien growths creates some genuinely creepy imagery.

Facial animation can occasionally drift into uncanny territory, however, particularly during emotional scenes where expressions lack a little weight and realism. The voice mixing can also sound strangely isolated at times, almost as if characters are speaking inside a recording booth rather than a physical environment. That said, the slightly hollow sound design may well be an intentional stylistic choice to match the cold emptiness of space.

I do still miss the fixed cinematic camera angles from earlier Supermassive games, though. While the new over-the-shoulder perspective works perfectly fine, some of the visual identity and cinematic framing from older entries feel slightly diminished.


Atmosphere, goo, and something familiar

The biggest issue with Directive 8020 is that the story rarely escapes the shadow of better sci-fi horror before it.
The game wears its inspirations proudly, pulling heavily from classics like The Thing, Life, Alien, and countless other sci-fi horror stories. The problem is that Directive 8020 rarely builds on those ideas in especially meaningful ways.
There are doppelgangers, spreading alien growths, paranoia-driven confrontations, and even a major twist that feels pulled directly from decades-old science fiction. While these influences are utilised effectively enough to keep the story engaging, very little about the overall narrative feels especially original.

Some of the visual inspirations are even harder to ignore. The grotesque, fleshy corruption spreading throughout the ship immediately brought The Callisto Protocol to mind, to the point where certain environments and creature designs feel almost identical side-by-side.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that Directive 8020 occasionally hints at genuinely interesting ideas before stepping away from them too quickly.

The doppelganger paranoia concept in particular feels massively underused. There was real potential here for a deeper trust system that could have transformed both the narrative and decision-making into something genuinely unique. Instead, those moments mostly appear during the later stages of the game and never fully evolve into the core mechanic they probably should have been.

Despite all of this, I still found myself enjoying the ride. Even if the game borrows heavily from better horror stories, Supermassive still understands how to structure tension, pacing, and spectacle effectively enough to keep things consistently entertaining.


Pick, Choose, Die, Repeat

Watching stories unfold, making split-second decisions, and surviving jump scare QTEs remain the heart and soul of the Supermassive formula, and Directive 8020 continues to excel in those areas.

The biggest gameplay change this time around is the new over-the-shoulder perspective, which allows for more active gameplay elements. There is a much greater emphasis on stealth, environmental exploration, problem-solving, and avoiding threats directly.

None of these mechanics is especially deep. You’ll spend plenty of time finding fuses, sneaking past monsters, crawling through vents, and interacting with fairly basic puzzles. Yet despite their simplicity, these gameplay sections still work surprisingly well as pacing tools.

They help break up the heavier narrative sequences without overstaying their welcome, while also adding a stronger sense of physical tension during dangerous encounters. Importantly, mistakes during stealth sections and QTEs often carry genuine consequences rather than simply creating the illusion of danger.

The real star of the show, however, remains the branching narrative system itself. Supermassive still feels unmatched when it comes to structuring large-scale decision trees and reactive storytelling. Watching events spiral into wildly different outcomes based on small choices remains endlessly compelling, and Directive 8020 may contain some of the most complex branching paths the studio has created so far.

By the end of my second full playthrough, I was still eager to go back, experiment with different decisions, intentionally make terrible choices, and uncover alternate outcomes.

Ironically, the biggest thing discouraging replayability is the inability to skip cutscenes you’ve already watched. On repeat playthroughs, being forced to sit through long sequences multiple times becomes surprisingly frustrating, especially in a game specifically designed around replaying different narrative paths.

Thankfully, the excellent rewind system helps soften that issue slightly. Unlike previous Supermassive games, Directive 8020 allows players to rewind and alter major choices from the very beginning instead of locking the feature behind a completed playthrough.

While I’d still recommend experiencing your first run naturally without rewinding mistakes, the feature adds a huge amount of accessibility and flexibility for newer players or completionists wanting to experiment. There are also plenty of secrets and collectables scattered throughout the campaign, including some fun references connecting Directive 8020 to previous anthology entries. Which is super neat.


Overall?

Directive 8020 doesn’t dramatically evolve Supermassive’s formula, but it refines it into one of the studio’s strongest and most replayable horror experiences to date.

The story and characters may struggle to escape the shadow of better sci-fi horror before it, but the branching narrative design, pacing, and tension remain consistently compelling throughout.

It may not dethrone Until Dawn, but it comfortably stands among Supermassive’s stronger releases and easily surpasses The Quarry, which often felt like a far less focused attempt to recapture Until Dawn’s success.
If you’re a fan of Supermassive Games’ Dark anthology, then this is a no-brainer; pick it up and play solo or with friends. But if you were hoping for a huge leap in design, then it’s not going to scratch that itch. Directive 8020 with it’s flaws is still a highly engaging and enthralling narrative adventure which shows the developers are still king of the genre. But I hope their next game branches out and explores something new and much less familiar.

+ The Supermassive branching format is still compelling and fun
+ Solid writing, and gripped me from start to finish
+ Some new ideas and refinements to the formula
+ Lots of replay value, multiplayer and unlockable content

- Overused story elements not utilised in the best way
- Some character writing feels underdeveloped
- New gameplay elements are welcomed, but a little simple

A PS5 review copy of Directive 8020 ws kindly provided by the publisher