Directive 8020 Features Supermassive's Most Lethal Finale Yet

One of the biggest obstacles choice-based games face, especially those as narrative-driven as The Dark Pictures Anthology, is balancing a clear, cohesive story with the freedom players expect to shape it themselves. Like every scriptwriter or book author, every video game developer has a specific story they want to tell, but the interactivity and modern expectations of games have a way of complicating that vision. That’s something Supermassive Games has taken into consideration with Directive 8020, to the point that it features the developer’s most lethal finale yet in an effort to tell a compelling story while honoring the choices players make.

In a recent interview with GameRant, director Will Doyle laid out how Supermassive is responding to criticisms of the studio’s previous Dark Pictures games, particularly when it comes to how much (or how little) they factor in the player’s choices. One of the biggest complaints has apparently centered around plot armor—a narrative device where a character survives dangerous situations or avoids failure simply because they are necessary for the plot, rather than through logical, consistent, or earned survival. As a result, Directive 8020 is stripping the cast of plot armor entirely, to the point that “pretty much anyone can die” in the game.

Player Choice Gives Directive 8020 Its Many Branches

The most iconic feature of any Dark Pictures game, by far, is its branching narrative. The series isn’t the only bunch of games out there that have stories with multiple outcomes, but what Supermassive does differently with its games that many other game developers do not is it ensures almost every choice that players make comes with consequences that can be felt throughout the narrative rather than saving the results for the very end. Even some of the most well-known choice-driven RPGs can’t compete with Supermassive’s branching stories, as those titles tend to prefer confining player agency to a few major crossroads rather than a series of crossroads that produce heavily nuanced narratives.

The most iconic feature of any Dark Pictures game, by far, is its branching narrative.

In fact, Directive 8020 has one of the clearest examples of this with its new Turning Point system, which allows players to rewind, not to just key decisions from the story, but to every single choice they’ve made up to that point. Within the Turning Point menu in-game, a massive tree with every decision is displayed, showing just how far Supermassive takes its branching stories and how complex things can get when there are so many choices involved.

Directive 8020 Isn’t as Branching as Man of Medan, But It’s Still “Hugely Branching”

Doyle calls this the “wonder of narrative games,” and the very thing that could drive players who prefer more engaging gameplay to dive into a cinematic, story-driven game like Directive 8020. On that note, I felt compelled to ask him about how far the next Dark Pictures entry takes things in terms of complexity, especially considering it’s incorporating more of what he refers to as “on the sticks,” live gameplay moments in an attempt to broaden the series’ reach. His first instinct was to compare Directive 8020 to a previous Dark Pictures game, Man of Medan:

We do this differently with every single game for a couple of reasons. One, we don’t want to become predictable, but also we’re always wrestling with this whole branching narrative puzzle. We’re trying to approach it from different angles, find best practices. Like Man of Medan is hugely branching. I wouldn’t say [Directive 8020] is as branching as Man of Medan, but it is very branching.

To be fair, Man of Medan truly is one of Supermassive Games’ most branching narratives to date, if not its most branching story. At the time of its release, it was even considered the studio’s most structurally branching game, with a wide range of diverging paths, early character deaths, and numerous ending permutations shaped by player choice. That level of variability means entire sequences, character perspectives, and outcomes can change dramatically from one playthrough to the next, even if some of those branches eventually converge or lead to similar conclusions.

The fact that Doyle immediately compared Directive 8020‘s complexity to Man of Medan and not a different Dark Pictures game already suggests that the upcoming fifth entry could at least take second place to Man of Medan‘s branching narrative. However, he also went into detail about how Directive 8020 aims to ensure it won’t just have more choices for players to make, but that those choices will matter more than they ever have before in a Dark Pictures game. As he explained:

There are a few things we do in [Directive 8020] that we have never really done before. If you listen to how our fans talk about branching, one of the phrases they often use is “plot armor.” So, how long can a character go before they die in the story? How long are they invulnerable for? And that’s a challenge for us, because to tell really, really good stories, you need a bit of that. An example is House of Ashes, which is probably one of our better received stories, and it’s because of the dynamic between Jason and Salim, which can vary, but always happens. So, that’s an example of plot armor. House of Ashes would not be the same without that.

Here, Doyle got right to the heart of why it’s so challenging to make a cohesive narrative that still respects player choice when he referenced House of Ashes. While the game still allows for multiple outcomes and character deaths, it deliberately holds certain threads together long enough for its central relationship between Jason and Salim to develop, guiding both characters through shared scenarios before fully opening up the branching paths. That subtle layer of plot armor doesn’t make them invincible, but it ensures their arc has time to breathe, which is a big reason why their dynamic stood out to critics as the most compelling part of the story. In other words, House of Ashes shows that sometimes maintaining narrative cohesion means temporarily limiting just how far player choice can diverge, at least until the story’s core themes and character beats have had a chance to land.

Directive 8020 Avoids Plot Armor So That “Pretty Much Anyone Can Die”

Even so, plot armor is one of the most heavily criticized narrative devices in all media, even outside of gaming, because it allows characters to survive or succeed because the story needs them to, even if it’s not believable. In the end, that undermines any amount of danger the story is trying to communicate, and it’s especially noticeable when players make a potentially life-altering choice for a video game character, only for it to never amount to much, if anything at all, in the form of consequence.

Directive 8020 is stripping the cast of plot armor entirely, to the point that “pretty much anyone can die” in the game.

So, because Supermassive wants its players to feel the weight of their choices in Directive 8020, it has removed plot armor from the equation, despite how difficult it is to accomplish that while telling a “really good story.” In fact, it seems that no character is safe in the game, as players can complete the game with only one left standing. Continuing his thoughts on branching narratives, Doyle explained:

In [Directive 8020], we have played around with a few things, and one of the things we’ve done is we’ve made the end of the story very branching. So, when you get to sort of Episode 7 and 8, pretty much anyone can die, and that means that when you come into the final episode, you can have almost any combination of characters, and you can even solo it with certain characters. So, you could only have one person left. And that’s really fun, because now you can replay it and go, “What’s it like if it’s just Cooper for the final episode? What’s it like if it’s just Stafford?” And that’s been quite fun for us.

Here, that philosophy reaches its logical extreme. By removing those guardrails and pushing its branching further into the final stretch, Directive 8020 is making its outcomes harder to predict and easier to lose control of. The structure now has to account for wildly different character combinations heading into the finale, with deaths that can occur earlier and more dynamically than before, rather than being confined to specific scripted beats. That means the final episodes aren’t just a culmination of the player’s prior choices, but a constantly shifting scenario where the story adapts to whoever is left, even if that’s only a solo survivor.

Directive 8020 Supermassive Most Lethal Finale Yet

Ultimately, that’s where Directive 8020 may end up being Supermassive’s most lethal finale yet. By allowing players to reach the final episode with nearly any combination of survivors, even just one, the game turns its ending into something far less controlled than previous entries. Instead of guiding characters toward specific outcomes, it appears to let those outcomes fully reflect the consequences of player choice, which is a significant shift from how the series has handled its finales in the past.