In Space, No One Can Hear You Groan
HIGH The best action climax the series has ever offered.
LOW Gotta say, that’s a pretty dumb plan, [REDACTED].
WTF Oh, so when you said ‘Shoggoth’, you meant that literally.
Coming after a nearly four-year hiatus, Directive 8020, the newest entry in Supermassive Games’ Dark Pictures franchise, has a lot of expectations to live up to, as the first in the series to focus entirely on a single-player experience, whereas the rest were meant primarily to be enjoyed co-op. It’s also making an effort to attract a survival horror audience by adding real-time stealth sequences, while in the past, all action was QTE and minigame-based. Supermassive Games is taking some big swings, and I can report that, in almost every case, they connect.
Set a mere 35 years in the future, Directive 8020 follows the crew of the Cassiopeia, a forward reconnaissance ship sent to make sure that an exoplanet is safe to land on before the colony ship arrives. Their vital mission is turned into a nightmare when they find themselves besieged by strange creatures capable of mimicking them perfectly. The player’s role is to guide five characters through a dangerous gauntlet on a hostile planet, where any member of their team could betray them at any moment.
Well, not any moment – as a narrative adventure, 8020 follows a fairly linear storyline, which the plot barreling forward at a truly impressive pace. One moment the player will be trying to track down a missing crewmember, the next they’ll struggle to survive a crash landing, and soon after that they’ll be forced to decide which of two identical people is really an alien monster and shoot them in the head before they have a chance to slaughter the crew. Perhaps the story’s greatest strength is just how propulsive it is. The tale takes around seven hours to play from beginning to end, but in my experience it just flew by – there’s never a long gap between action setpieces or tense showdowns, keeping the player hooked all the way through.
The new gameplay elements are largely successful, and do a great job of giving 8020 a kind of immediacy that was lacking in previous titles. Take the stealth sequences — they aren’t the most complex, since they ask players to duck behind objects and use things in the environment to distract monsters, but I replayed each sequence a number of times and there’s plenty of room for experimentation, optimizing routes, and more aggressive strategies. If a player has a strong QTE game, they can charge through levels as long as their stun baton holds out, but if they’re more wary they can take their time and map patrol routes to find gaps to sneak through.
The rest of 8020 is largely a traditional narrative adventure. There are exploration scenes where the player looks for clues and solves simple puzzles, cutscenes where they have to make pivotal choices that affect the flow of the story, and QTEs that determine whether characters live or die. The developers at Supermassive have more than a decade of experience making games like this, so it’s not a surprise that Directive 8020 feels as good as it does. However, where it falls a little short is the storytelling and character work.
The crew of the Cassiopeia aren’t the most engaging bunch, and they lack the kind of memorable standouts that previous Dark Pictures titles have offered. There are good performances and the occasional impressive scene, but they’re few and far between in this fairly standard tale of paranoia and survival.
The script, specifically, is a slightly larger issue, because there’s a pretty big problem at the core of it. I can’t detail my sticking point as it’s a huge spoiler, but it’s bad enough that I was left baffled at the end of things when I should have been riding the thrill of a truly incredible action-packed climax. Fans of the series don’t have to worry – this isn’t a Little Hope situation, and yes the plot is actually happening within the story – but the larger concepts are ultimately a complete mess. So long as 8020 stays focused on the travails of people desperately struggling to stay alive on an alien world, the story hums along smoothly. Whenever the focus pulls back? All of the logic completely falls apart.
It’s too bad, because Directive 8020‘s other new feature is an incredibly robust plot branching system which allows the player to freely jump to any part of the story and play from there.
Looking at each chapter’s spiderweb of options is daunting at first – is it really feasible to explore every branch of this story? 8020 makes it easy to do so by putting instructions on each of the locked story nodes, allowing the player to see what decisions they’ll have to go back and make in order to see them. It’s a fairly reactive tale, with major characters able to die fairly early in the proceedings without completely upending the plot. I’ve played plenty of narrative adventures, and this one is, by far, the easiest to navigate and explore, with its relatively modest running time ensuring that the player will never have to wait too long to see the results of new choices play out.
As a new direction for the Dark Pictures series, Directive 8020 gets the job done. It makes it clear that Supermassive Games can adapt to changing tastes and offer a streamlined, accessible version of their most famous product. It’s only a pity that the script can’t match up to the gameplay. Moment to moment, as an experience, this is some of the best work Supermassive has ever done — but pull back and look at the whole, and narrative flaws appear.
Hopefully they’ll take everything they learned on this one and use it to present equally robust systems with a more coherent story next time around.
Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Supermassive Games. It is currently available on PC/PS5/XBS and SW2. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. 2 hours were spent in multiplayer modes.
Parents: The game received an M from the ESRB, and it contains Blood and Gore, Strong Language, and Intense Violence. This is incredibly gory, almost beyond all measure. People are beheaded, crushed, burned alive, and worse. There’s no sex or alcohol, but drugs do appear briefly! Seriously, though, no children allowed.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no audio cues that will affect gameplay, I tested out many scenes without audio and had no issues. There are accessibility options that replace audio cues with visual ones in stealth scenes. All dialogue is subtitled, and the subtitles can be resized. The game is fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.
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