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Much as I enjoyed the previous four games in The Dark Pictures series, they always felt a little haunted. And I’m not talking about being haunted by the various horrific creatures, specters, and monsters housed within the series. No, The Dark Pictures has always been haunted by persistent comparisons to developer Supermassive Games’ 2015 interactive horror, Until Dawn.
I’m guilty of making this comparison as well. Even with my previous favorite Dark Pictures entry, 2021’s House of Ashes. I remember thinking, “That was pretty great, but not as good as Until Dawn.” But what makes the latest installment in the interactive horror anthology, Directive 8020, so impressive is that for the first time, I found myself not subconsciously comparing the experience to one released over a decade ago.
There’s no question in my mind that Directive 8020 is the best Dark Pictures yet. Not only does it offer the most intense and engaging narrative of the series, but Supermassive Games has made some very smart tweaks to the established formula, which make experiencing (and crucially, actually playing) this spooky sci-fi story even more enjoyable than its predecessors.
In space, no one can hear you scream
I suppose it’s not really a surprise that I took to Directive 8020 so quickly. “Alien” is my favorite movie franchise of all time, and this newest entry in the series leaves Earth behind for a sci-fi horror story set 12 light-years from Earth. However, much as I’ve seen 1979’s “Alien” theorized as an inspiration (and I’m sure it is), I actually got a bigger “Prometheus” vibe overall.
You play as several crew members onboard a colony ship, the Cassiopeia. The crew’s mission to orbit the planet Tau Ceti f, to gain critical information ahead of a second ship, the Andromeda, arriving in six months, which will terraform the planet and make it suitable for humans. Naturally, this is a horror story, so as soon as the playable crew awakens from hypersleep, everything goes to hell. Turns out there’s a shapeshifting extraterrestrial onboard (“The Thing” is clearly another inspiration), and things get even worse from there, as this monster can mimic the appearance of the crew.
In Directive 8020, the six-to eight-hour story is split into eight episodes. This is a more significant change than it might sound on paper. Previously, Dark Pictures titles were technically split into multiple “chapters,” but the narrative felt largely seamless (bar interruptions from the Curator, whose role is reworked here). Those stories were presented like a movie.
Directive 8020 instead takes inspiration from a bingeable TV show. Each episode ends with a cliffhanger and “end of episode” text. It’s not a new idea; Alan Wake used this format back in 2010, but the format works supremely well here. Far from ruining the narrative flow, the episode structure made me even more eager to consume each one as fast as possible.
The Dark Pictures, you know, but a little different
The crux of “The Dark Pictures” is the same as the interactive horror formula that Supermassive Games has been utilizing since 2015. That means you’ll spend a lot of time picking dialogue choices, making critical decisions under time pressure, and the (in)famous inclusion of QTE sequences (but you can choose how much leeway you have with these).
However, I really appreciate that this time there’s more game within Directive 8020. It’s by no means a full-on survival-horror experience, a la Dead Space, but third-person stealth sequences have been added. These see you sulking around the Cassiopeia, trying to avoid a foe. And unlike a traditional horror game, if you’re caught, you don’t get a “game over” screen and a retry. The story continues, with the effects of your failure rippling out.
Directive 8020 also introduces other smaller gameplay additions, like the ability to send messages between the crew, which lightly flesh out each character. Plus, the sections where you are in direct control of a character are significantly less clunky than previous Dark Pictures. Your characters no longer move like an unwieldy tank, which is a much-needed improvement.
Reliving the nightmare over and over (and over)
The biggest new addition to Directive 8020 is the new Turning Points. This replaces the old Butterfly effect system that originated in Until Dawn, and was rebranded as Bearings in the previous Dark Pictures titles. Like those games, you will often make plot-critical choices, ones that can have unforeseen consequences, and even result in the death of a character.
However, this time, your choices and their outcomes are all charted in a sprawling spider-web within the pause menu. It’s neat to look at the flowchart of your progressing story, but Directive 8020 goes further and lets you rewind to any previous point in the story without penalty. This enables you to redo a decision instantly if you’re unhappy with the results.
Take, for example, a moment in episode two, where I made a rash call that got a character killed. I was pretty disappointed to lose somebody so early in the story. In a previous Dark Pictures game, my only option would have been to restart, but in Directive 8020, I was able to instantly rewind the clock and make the correct decision this time, saving the captain’s life.
It’s not just about correcting mistakes either. The Turning Points system makes it easier than ever to see different outcomes. You can leap about the narrative timeline as you wish, letting you explore different story paths with ease, and without multiple full playthroughs. In a later episode, after making a decision in a tense standoff that I was happy with, I had a lot of fun exploring what might have happened if I’d chosen a different path.
However, I can see some players disliking this system, as it does rob decisions of their weight when you can simply rewind and try again with a single button press. Fortunately, Supermassive Games thought of this potential downside and has included a specific mode that locks you out of Turning Points. Pick Survivor mode, and every decision is permanent.
Should you play Directive 8020?
If you have any fondness for the previous Dark Pictures games, then you absolutely need to play Directive 8020. As somebody who’s played them all, it’s the best of the bunch. The sci-fi setting is everything I hoped it would be, the gameplay upgrades are great, some of the decisions you must make are darn difficult, and Turning Points is an awesome inclusion.
I even recommend Directive 8020 to players who haven’t clicked with The Dark Pictures. If you’re one of the many who have been patiently waiting for Supermassive Games to recapture that special sauce that made Until Dawn a fan-favorite, Directive 8020 is exactly that. It marks The Dark Picture finding its own footing and delivering a memorable interactive horror experience, unburdened by comparisons to what came before.
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