The Dark Pictures Makes Its Return With Some Huge Upgrades

Man, I’ve sure missed The Dark Pictures Anthology. After four entries released four years in a row, it’s now been three years since the end of season one, and I’ve been dying for another movie night massacre ever since. Now the series is finally back with Directive 8020: Supermassive Games’ version of The Thing in space. It’s dropping the Dark Pictures Anthology branding, but it’s picking up some exciting new features.

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Which game will survive? Which will not? The choice is ours.

I got to play a decent chunk of the upcoming cinematic survival horror at Summer Game Fest last weekend, where I was happy to discover the studio has used those three years off to give the series a complete makeover. Between the transition to Unreal Engine 5, the studio’s increased focus on action gameplay, and the new turning points system, Directive 8020 feels like the game this team has been building towards throughout the entire Dark Pictures series.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Kill Someone And Steal Their Body

It’s about damn time Supermassive finally tackled aliens. We’ve had ghosts and seal killers and the occult and even freaking vampires, but we’ve never gotten to experience the paranoia, isolation, and helplessness of horror set in outer space. Directive 8020 goes full sci-fi, and as we’ve come to expect from all of Supermassive’s genre forays, its vibes are immaculate.

Directive 8020, like other Dark Pictures titles, leans heavily on the classics. Its story of a spaceship under siege by an unknown alien threat is rooted in the cosmic horror of Alien, Event Horizon, The Thing, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Its premise is familiar: while searching for a new planet to replace the dying Earth, the crew of the Cassopeia crashland on an alien planet. Soon, they’re under attack by an amorphous threat that can mimic the crew by transforming into them. How can you trust anyone when they might be the monster in disguise? It’s a classic trope for a reason, and I’m excited to see Supermassive’s take on it.

With limited time, I was thrown right into the chaos. Crew members are dead, one is locked up under suspicion of being an alien, and two of the crew are being attacked by their own clones. Things are happening fast, and it doesn’t take long before one crew member is pointing a gun at another one, and now I have to decide whether or not he pulls the trigger.

Turning Points Give You More Control Over Your Own Story

In the other Dark Pictures games, you would decide to shoot that person or not, then you’d find out if they were really the monster or not, and whatever the outcome may be, the plot would move forward from there. Whatever happens happens, and there’s no going back – at least not until your next playthrough.

You can still play Directive 8020 like that. I probably will, because I like to have my own canon version of the story that is personal to me, mistakes and all. But with the new Turning Points system, you have the freedom to change your choices anytime you want. You can rewind, redo, and try again. It’s a tool that gives you unprecedented control over the story, if that’s something you want.

The presentation of Turning Points is really cool. The timeline of the story is laid out in a long chain, which each decision point spread out, creating a giant web of causes and effects. You can examine the timeline to get a better idea of how your choices impacted the story (something that was sometimes pretty opaque in previous titles), but you can also travel back to any previous turning point and change your decision. You’ll have to continue the story from there to see what changes – you can’t just jump back to where you were to bring characters back to life – but it’s a great way to see more of the story without having to replay the entire game.

Taking More Cues From Survival Horror

The four Dark Pictures games have slowly added more and more character control to each game, allowing you to not only make choices for the characters but explore the scenes with them too. Directive 8020 takes it even further with sequences that would be indistinguishable from modern survival horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

I played a stealth sequence where a character falls into a pod bay on the ship and is pursued by a horrifying, xenomorph-like alien. As the monster patrols, you take control of the character to stealthily make your way from one end of the room to the other. You have to time your moves when the alien’s back is turned, hide when it gets near, and throw objects you pick up off the ground to distract it. In this scene, Directive 8020 transforms into a third-person action survival game, the only difference being that if the monster catches you, you don’t just reload your last save a try again.

That’s a huge difference. I’ve often complained about the way horror games lose all of their tension when the monster catches you and you simply restart at the last checkpoint. There is no fear of being chased when you know it doesn’t matter if you get caught. In Directive 8020, though, it does matter.

You may not die right away. I let the creature catch me just before I could make it to the exit, which triggered a cutscene of my character getting knocked down and beaten. He manages to scramble away, but he now has an injury that will undoubtedly come up again and change the course of his story, potentially even helping to determine whether he lives or dies.

If you hate that, the Turning Point system will let you go back and try again like any other game. But if you’re brave enough to just let things play out however they may, these gameplay sequences add a whole new layer of consequences to the story. It’s not just choice A or B; getting caught by the monster near the exit could have a totally different outcome than getting caught right away. How it catches you could change what injuries you sustain. It’s a more complicated web of turning points than ever before, and it’s all documented for you in a nice, easy-to-understand flow chart.

It’s been a long wait for the start of season two, but so far it looks like it will be worth it. Thanks to the new engine, characters and environments look more realistic than ever, and with extra time, Supermassive has been able to refine the formula into its most potent version yet. They had me at The Thing, but after seeing all the big changes, I have a feeling this is going to be the best entry in the series so far.