While Supermassive Games found success with Until Dawn and The Quarry, the studio’s anthology series, The Dark Pictures, has been wildly uneven.
The series began on a high note before falling into familiar territory, and as a result, it felt predictable, safe, and sometimes even flat in execution. In what seems like a pretty bold pivot, Directive 8020 jettisons players into space rather than into cabins, dilapidated ships, or cursed towns. Is it a bold move to take players out of orbit and into unfamiliar territory?
You Get More Dark Pictures Shenanigans In Directive 8020
Set in a time where Earth is dying, and humanity is on the brink of extinction, Tau Ceti f, a planet 12 light-years away, may be a possible home. The ship Cassiopeia crashes on the planet and soon discovers they are being hunted by an organism capable of mimicking its prey. Directive 8020 stars Lashana Lynch as Brianna Young, the Cassiopeia’s pilot.
On paper, the idea sounds novel and something that’s caught my attention for some time. It looks incredible, too and stands up well enough through the eight chapters you’ll experience. In my 10-hour playthrough, I swapped between the crew of five caught in a dire situation when all they really wanted was to find a new home for humanity.
Players must navigate the tight corridors of the Cassiopeia, avoiding both the alien and its mimic forms. The stealth system, newly added here, has you using cover or distractions to survive — enemies are reactive to sound and light, so every footstep, flashlight beam, or creaking door can be catastrophic. I was immediately reminded of The Thing and, even more recently, 2017’s Life, with Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds in the setup, and it works well.
However, while the setup works, the execution comes off uneven. The stealth sections quickly bring the pacing down and don’t always work. The shift to a third-person game over the traditional Telltale style of storytelling is something I’m not 100 percent convinced was necessary, and I still thoroughly enjoy the traditional approach to storytelling seen in Until Dawn more than Directive 8020. This shift allows the player to explore the environment for additional details spread across the ship; whether by parsing data or the screen, you learn more about the inhabitants.
Turning Points Give Players Agency
The meat and bones of Supermassive’s games rely on player choice and quick time events. These mechanics return, and dictate who will survive and who will die, and it’ll take multiple playthroughs to see everything on offer. I’m all for games offering more than you expect, but it comes with a cost: how much time do you want to invest to see everything? Did someone you had hoped to survive, face their destiny and end up dead? Please make sure you choose the right mode, as it lets you rewind key moments via the Turning Points system.
For trophy hunters, the new system allows you to claim those trophies by rewinding to reverse any unwanted deaths. It’s a nice addition, something I would’ve loved to see in earlier games, but it works well in Directive 8020 and allows you to experience story beats you would otherwise miss out on unless you begin another playthrough.
The Turning Point system allows you to not only rewind deaths but also update player traits and adjust the conditions necessary to kick off new scenes, without having to stress about relaying the entire game. You’ll be informed of the conditions you must meet before scenes unfold, so there is clearly a lot of thought put into how you engage with the branches of Directive 8020.
And speaking of story, Directive 8020’s story has tons of scares, some more intentional than others, and some scarier than I expected, too. The story isn’t particularily treading new ground. Still, it’s mostly competent, if a bit predictable at times, and excellent performances like Lashana Lynch’s help take pressure off the narrative’s delivery, which I find is sometimes uneven. But there are five playable characters with many branching pathways, so I’m curious to see how others will find their time with the story.
The alien lifeform is genuinely a terrifying threat, and it’s shown as something I would never wish to witness. It’s gnarly and twisted, and the fact that it can take on any shape makes encounters with it all the more horrible, as its monstrous forms have an unsettling appearance. And then you have those tense moments when you’re with someone and unable to discern whether it’s a genuine human being or the alien lifeform waiting to take you out. The story has a sense of tension at times, and I’m thankful it exists.
Verdict
Directive 8020 is the start of a new season for the Dark Pictures anthology, and it’s’s off to a good start. The massive leap from Earth to space effectively gives us a way to experience terror and mostly works. Still, it’s often undone by dreadful stealth sections that quickly scuttle the tension due to overreliance on staying quiet. However, for the things I don’t enjoy, Supermassive Games delivers a great game with a vital sense of tension.
[The publisher provided a copy of the game for review purposes.]
Reviewed on: PlayStation 5
