Supermassive Games has spent years building out the Dark Pictures formula, but there’s always been a gap between what those stories aim for and how they actually play. Directive 8020 is the first time that gap feels smaller. Set aboard the colony ship Cassiopeia after a crash landing on Tau Ceti f, the game centers on a crew sent to scout a new home for humanity, only for that mission to collapse almost immediately. They’re stranded, cut off from help, and dealing with something that came down with them, something that can imitate them and move through the ship without being easily identified. That’s just Directive 8020‘s premise though, and where it truly shines is in how its developer has evolved its iconic formula.
I recently went hands on with Directive 8020 on behalf of GameRant, and my time with the game didn’t take long to show where this one is different, and it goes beyond the setup. Within the first few minutes, it was clear Supermassive is pushing for a more involved experience while still holding onto its choice-driven structure. Over the course of around half an hour, I got a sense of how those ideas come together, where they work, and where I’m still not fully convinced. It’s enough to come away with a strong first impression, even if the full picture isn’t there yet.
Directive 8020 Finally Puts Supermassive Games “On the Sticks”
My preview of Directive 8020 threw me right into an 18-hour time jump and a live stealth section, where I was tasked with evading Williams, a crew member who appeared to be going mad. This is something brand-new for a Supermassive title, as the developer’s earlier games like Until Dawn and previous Dark Pictures entries feature light stealth sections, but they’re heavily scripted and limited to simple actions like “don’t move” and “keep calm.” Directive 8020, on the other hand, saw me actively moving through areas and avoiding enemy patrols while trying to reach my destination.
Director Will Doyle told me in an interview I did with him prior that the primary purpose of these “on the sticks” moments, as he referred to them, was to increase the tension in these sequences, and that’s exactly what they did. In fact, somewhere in the middle of the second stealth segment, I realized my body had been tensed up the entire time, and I wasn’t even aware of it.
In this first sequence and the live stealth section that I went through later, the enemies I was attempting to invade felt very unpredictable for a horror game, which is refreshing even after playing through a game like Resident Evil Requiem, where enemy patrol routes are often so predictable that it reduces the tension during stealth segments and makes it feel more like a puzzle than a fear-filled game of cat and mouse.
Somewhere in the middle of the second stealth segment, I realized my body had been tensed up the entire time, and I wasn’t even aware of it.
Despite even having a guide for the first stealth sequence in my preview of Directive 8020, I was panicking a bit, and not listening to her instructions because, even though I knew in the back of my mind that she was right, I didn’t trust her to lead me out of harm’s way. Williams’ movements just felt too erratic for this to be as simple as my guide made it sound. I enjoyed how the characters interacted when I went my own way too, with my guide questioning what I was doing and my response being a confident “Improvising” or “You’ll see.”
Williams did manage to catch me at one point, but I was able to temporarily paralyze him with my stun baton and move to another location. The weapon is no Get Out of Jail Free card, though, as it had a cooldown that would mean I’d need to be more vigilant from that point on—until it was available again, at least. One of my most useful tools was my Utility Strap, which allowed me to turn on a nearby monitor and distract Williams long enough to let me slip by. Even then, he moved so quickly, the tension never really subsided.
Directive 8020’s Mission Falls Apart Faster Than Expected
Upon making it to my destination, my crewmate followed quickly behind, we sealed the door, and the time jumped back 18 hours—back to the present. It was here I learned a bit about what was going on, what the mission was, and potentially why Williams was going mad, seemingly possessed by something inhuman.
A discussion amongst the crew told me that the Cassiopeia, their ship, had crash-landed on Tau Ceti f, leaving the crew stranded with no fuel, depleting life support systems, and a damaged FTL antenna that gives them no way of reaching out for help. The mission itself was meant to scout a potential new home for humanity, since Earth is on the brink, but that plan completely unraveled the moment they hit the surface.
Once the crew regrouped, they began realizing something else had come down with them, tied to a meteorite impact, and it began spreading throughout the ship in the form of a strange organic growth. At first, the assumption was that one of their own, Simms, had gone rogue, “whacking people” aboard the ship. The crew eventually organizes around that idea, treating the situation like a containment problem they can still control, and sending a couple of crew members after Simms.
Choices and Turning Points
During this segment, I was introduced to Supermassive’s iconic choice-driven cinematic gameplay, where my choices affected everything from a character’s traits to their dialogue and the story that followed. Choosing between options like “Doubt” and “Consider” ultimately affected the traits of the character tied to the decision, but Directive 8020‘s new Turning Points system was also revealed during this sequence, making things even more interesting.
Directive 8020‘s Turning Points system functions as a sort of “rewind” mechanic that allows players to alter past decisions they’ve made to produce new results. However, rather than limiting it to a guessing game, Supermassive incorporated a paths tree that reveals every potential branch connected to a choice. It doesn’t show what each outcome is, but it does show how many outcomes there are and which have yet to be discovered. According to my interview with director Will Doyle, the purpose of this was to allow completionists a chance to see everything in the game without requiring them to do dozens of full playthroughs.
I was initially concerned about how Turning Points might undermine consequence in a game where every decision matters and is supposed to feel like it matters, but it’s possible to play through Directive 8020 without Turning Points enabled. Apart from three standard difficulty options, the game features two distinct gameplay modes as well—Explorer and Survivor—which are selected upon starting a new game. Explorer keeps Turning Points active throughout the narrative, allowing players to rewind the story an unlimited number of times at any point during the game, whereas Survivor keeps Turning Points off until the story has been completed.
I really appreciate the way those options are divided because, rather than each one simply including or excluding Turning Points, it still includes the feature, just in a different way. Playing through the game on Survivor mode doesn’t mean I’ll never get to use Turning Points, it just means I’ll have to live with the consequences of my initial playthrough. Nevertheless, for my preview, I had Explorer mode enabled, because I wanted to see what Turning Points was like as soon as it became available.
Directive 8020‘s Turning Points system functions as a sort of “rewind” mechanic that allows players to alter past decisions they’ve made to produce new results.
Even so, I didn’t make use of Turning Points until I had finished the roughly 30-minute preview, simply because I wasn’t familiar enough with the story and characters to care all that much about the outcomes my decisions led to. However, upon using the feature to rewind to one of the biggest branching decisions in the preview, changing my choice there significantly altered what came after. I imagine completionists really will enjoy this feature, regardless of which mode they choose to play Directive 8020 on.
Directive 8020’s Horror Escalates Once the Truth Is Revealed
The next sequence saw me taking control of Brianna Young, Directive 8020‘s main protagonist, played by Leshana Lynch (No Time to Die, Captain Marvel). Here, Cooper, a fellow crewmate, and I were tasked with finding Simms, but it also required me to move through some claustrophobic emergency access tunnels that were immediately unsettling. And the deeper I moved through the tunnels, the creepier things became, after a good jumpscare set the tone and had me convinced I didn’t want to be here anymore.
Eventually, I found Simms, but she had been “dead for ages,” according to Young. Her face had been mutilated, leading to the conclusion that whatever was killing people down there wasn’t Simms at all, but something else entirely. I had no choice but to turn around and head back to Cooper, but not before I came face to face with whatever horror it was that, I assume, had killed Simms. It rapidly crawled toward me and, I think, moved past me for some reason. But at that point, moving through the tunnels felt like one of those nightmares where you feel like you’re being chased, but you don’t have the guts to turn around and check.
Nevertheless, I escaped, but only to be attacked by someone who seemed to be another crew member but was wearing a hood and a mask. In the chaos, I was separated from my friend, and my attacker, who once lay on the ground unconscious after a bad fall, stood up and began searching the area for me, triggering another live stealth section.
During this segment, I needed to extend a nearby bridge in order to escape, but upon reaching the bridge, I was notified it needed power. I then made my way toward a control room where I could turn the power on, but I was informed I’d need a power cell. This runaround the game was giving me just made things all the more tense, because I didn’t know what kind of threat I was dealing with here, and I didn’t want to find out. And the longer the game kept me out there, moving around while this apparent creature was stalking me, the more raised my heart rate and blood pressure became.
After finally extending the bridge, I decided to make a break for it. Unfortunately, getting across the bridge still resulted in an altercation with whatever that thing was, during which a series of QTEs allowed me to defend myself. I missed one, nailed the other, but even with that, I was saved by Cooper, who intervened with a weapon I had chosen to use during one of the game’s major Turning Point decisions I made earlier. Thus concluded my preview of Directive 8020, but I was ready for more.
Directive 8020 Has the Right Pieces, Now It Needs to Bring Them Together
What stood out to me most in my preview of Directive 8020 was how the live, on-the-sticks moments and the Turning Point system both feel like meaningful changes without losing what the developer is known for. The live sections immediately made the experience more tense in a way Supermassive’s older games never quite reached, simply because I wasn’t just reacting anymore, I was fully in it. I could feel that in how stressed I was during those sequences, especially with how unpredictable the threats felt. The Turning Point system, on the other hand, didn’t bother me as much as I expected it to. I like that it’s optional depending on how you play, and while I didn’t use it much during my initial run, going back and changing a major decision showed me that it can lead to meaningful differences without feeling like it cheapens the first experience.
Now that I’ve seen how those systems work alongside the game’s premise, I’m more interested in how everything comes together over a full playthrough. The setup is strong, especially once it becomes clear the crew doesn’t actually understand what they’re dealing with, and that uncertainty has a lot of potential if the story keeps building on it. I still need more time with the characters to really care about the outcomes, but the direction feels more focused than what I’ve seen from Supermassive in the past. If the full game can maintain that tension while giving those ideas room to develop, it could end up being one of the studio’s more complete experiences.
- Released
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May 12, 2026
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Intense Violence, Blood and Gore, Strong Language, In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
Directive 8020 launches on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S on May 12, 2026. GameRant was provided with a Steam code for the purposes of this preview.
