Directive 8020 Review

It has somehow been four years since we last saw anything of Supermassive’s Dark Pictures anthology, with The Devil In Me. While we’ve had interstitial titles such as The Quarry and The Casting of Frank Stone, we’ve long waited to get back to the Dark Pictures series proper. While the branding may be less front and centre, make no mistake this is still very much a Dark Pictures game, with all the choice and consequence – and twists – that we’d hope for. 

That’s not to say things haven’t changed and evolved in these last few years. Supermassive have refined the choose your own adventure nature in Directive 8020 massively, offering the easiest options yet to go back and alter our fates, find the branching paths, and see as many of the scenes as possible. 

This is thanks to the Turning Point feature. Frank Stone offered the Cutting Room Floor; a way to load back into key moments of the story as a whole to see alternate paths. In Directive 8020, this is expanded to every scene. Even minor, more linear scenes can be selected from the menu, and these can be done at any time on Explorer difficulty. It’s a great QoL change, letting us properly plan our story and routes, and reset as soon as we inevitably fuck something up. Fear not, as Survivor difficulty keeps things a bit more traditional, only unlocking Turning Points upon completing the game. But having the option is a winner in our eyes, as for as much as we like the previous entries, it always was a bit vague as to how to unlock other routes/endings. Now we can easily not only see routes, but how to unlock them as the scenes offer direct descriptors as to when and where we need to go to make a new choice.

This’d all be for nothing if the tale here was no good, but thankfully Directive 8020 offers a great sci-fi mystery to follow along with. We play as the crew of the Cassiopia, a deep space vessel tasked with charting a new planet, Tau Ceti F, in hopes of providing a new world for humanity to conquer. Earth is dying, and Mars was a washout, so the crew set off ahead of the main Andromeda ship to prepare the groundwork.

Of course, as ever in a Dark Pictures game, this is far from straightforward. Many, many tough choices must be made along the way, and our crew of explorers may or may not be able to trust what – and who – they see, or even make it to the finale alive. 

We feel Supermassive have done some of their best work in the moral choice department here. In Explorer mode at least, we’re warned when a big choice is presented, and the majority of them had us pause for thought. Early choices – such as which of two systems to power back on – come back into play just as we’ve forgotten about them, and it’s easy to be lost in the pressure of the moment and go the wrong way. 

Turning Point comes in handy then, but if you just want to play through no matter what then that is perfectly viable. We still get warnings on choices, and are notified when a consequence rears its head, and can choose at any time to go back and redo things.

In between the life and death matters, Directive 8020 offers slightly more direct gameplay than we’ve seen before. Exploring means unlocking secrets in the form of information and lore, while puzzles keep us on our toes (even if they aren’t especially tricky on their own). The biggest new addition here though is in stealth mechanics. At certain points, we’ll need to evade something or someone, meaning a lot of sneaking and using certain environmental aspects to distract them. It’s hardly Dishonored, but paired with Supermassive’s flair for the cinematic it is effective. An environmental pulse lets us keep track of enemies and key objects for a few seconds at a time, and there were several moments that had us gasp out loud as we almost bumped into danger as we snuck into a new area. 

We also see a new change in the format of the story. Rather than be book ended with a certain someone, Directive 8020 treats each chapter like a TV episode, with a sort of end credits-without-the-credits at the end of each one. Again, this allows us to keep on top of our choices and where we are in the story, giving the Dark Pictures a different feel to before.

We found ourselves hooked for the majority of the story in Directive 8020. It has just enough intrigue to keep us playing, with twists and turns that we did not see coming. There were a few times where a character made a choice without our input that made little sense, or we felt a little strong-armed into a few key choices where the obvious option was a little bit of both choices, but the story demanded one or the other, but such is the nature of horror stories we suppose.

Conclusion

All in all, it’s great to have The Dark Pictures back with us after an extended break. The Turning Point feature is fantastic (we’d like to see the older games retrofitted with it), the story is full of interesting twists and turns, and the extensions of more traditional gameplay are welcome. Some choices still leave us screaming at the screen to meet in the middle, but on the whole Directive 8020 maintains the series high bar.