Directive 8020 Preview – So, here’s the thing with outer space…

Supermassive’s The Dark Pictures Anthology is boldly going into the realms of science fiction next month, taking some very different inspirations to the earlier games in the series for the more expansive, more standalone Directive 8020. As the crew of the Cassiopeia head towards the planet Tau Ceti f, a meteoroid strike leaves the ship damaged, with a strange growth aboard, and that’s just the start of their troubles…

Instead of reaching Tau Ceti f and conducting remote research, they crash land and become completely stranded, their transmitter knocked out so they can’t contact Earth, and some of the crew start to act very, very strange. Or “sus”, to the Among Us fans out there.

One thing that caught me a little unawares was how Directive 8020 will play around with time, our hands-on session starting with two survivors needing to avoid alien simulacra that are hunting them, feeling like the surviving humans were outnumbered and certainly very outmatched physically.

Immediately, this throws you in at the deep end, as Cooper needs to evade a handful of the simulacra through hallways bathed in red light. They are, thankfully, rather rigid in their movements, walking stiffly back and forth, while Anders is using the cameras to help guide you through, and you do have a scanning pulse that can briefly highlight their positions. It’s simple, effective stealth, but it builds up to a final hurdle of needing to reach an elevator to escape, and a closer brush with danger than was comfortable.

Reaching the end of this segment then whisked us back to 18 hours previously, and immediately diffuses any of the suspicion that could fall upon Cooper, and fear for her safety. Probably. More importantly, jumping around in time gives Supermassive a little more freedom to balance the peaks and troughs of action through the game, allowing for a slower burn through early parts of the story that lean on dialogue and building tension, mixed together with more action drawn from later events.

But that’s not to say that there isn’t peril or action early on. Shortly after having crashed on Tau Ceti f and recognising that Simms has gone off the rails for some reason – spoiler: she’s probably an alien thing now – the rest of the crew cooks up a plan for what to do next, from rationing resources to figuring out a way to isolate and confront Simms down in the maze-like access vents. Oh, and they’ve got to figure out what this strange growth is as well. There’s an aside here, giving me a meaningful dialogue moment between the captain of the expedition and the corporate type that you just know is going to be a wrong ‘un in the long run, spouting about how he can definitely see the purple hued, dust storm-ridden landscape of Tau Ceti f being mankind’s new home. He’s either having a quiet breakdown or is genuinely delusional if you ask me – credit to the game for letting me just go “Uh…. are you sure you’re alright?”

But it’s time to take action. Young (portrayed by Lashana Lynch) steps up, offering to head into the vents and being entrusted with the one firearm on the ship for protection. This time, it’s Cooper who’s there to give backup and support, but Young has to go alone and there’s a shift to even more claustrophobic horror, switching from third to first person and feeling like there’s a real threat at any moment. I’d have loved to have a gun in hand, ready to start blasting at anything that moves, but it keeps the tension up and throws a couple of sudden scares. And would you believe that the vent locking plan didn’t even work? It never does, really, does it?

When the confrontation with the imposter does come, it comes with a bang, the fight leaning on classic QTEs and coming with the revelation of just how much of the ship is now infested with the black, sinewy alien gloop, spreading its way through a core part of the ship and seemingly with a beating energy source at its heart.

With the gun having been lost in the fight, it’s back to sneaking around and stealth, needing to activate an extending bridge to make your escape. Even though there’s just the one imposter here, and they have movements that you can read as they go back and forth searching for you, it was still fraught with worry, as their patrol area would move whenever I made some progress, injecting more uncertainty about where they would be looking once more.

What we didn’t really get to explore during this segment of the game were Supermassive’s take on the branching narratives, which have been so key within their horror games over the past decade, allowing characters to die and allowing the story to keep on moving. The new wrinkle to this is the Turning Points system, which lays out the sprawling narrative for you to see, letting you rewind to previous decision points or to the start of a section if you regret letting one of your characters die. It’s always a good feature to have, though you can play with it disabled if you prefer to the no-compromises experience.

Directive 8020 still feels like a Supermassive horror game in a lot of ways, with the snippets of player-led dialogue and QTE action at key points giving that grounded, while embracing more third-person stealth action. I’m keen to see how this can grow and evolve through the game, no doubt going hand-in-hand with the alien simulacra learning how to better mimic humans. But really, when The Thing is one of my favourite films, I just want to sink into the shapeshifting horror of space, suspense and suspicion.

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