Directive 8020 Leans Hard Into The Thing — Supermassive Promises Eyes, Teeth and Bones in Deep Space Body Horror

British developer Supermassive Games is about to launch Directive 8020, the fifth mainline game in its The Dark Pictures Anthology horror game series, following Man of Medan, Little Hope, House of Ashes, and The Devil in Me (there was also the PS VR2 exclusive Switchback).

Directive 8020 is special within the franchise for at least two reasons: it's the first entry to drop the anthology name "The Dark Pictures" from the title, and it's also the first one to take place in a sci-fi setting.

Set in the near future, the game follows the five-person crew of the Cassiopeia, a colony reconnaissance ship sent 12 light-years from a dying Earth to survey Tau Ceti f (a real exoplanet in the Cetus constellation with a purple-tinged atmosphere) as a potential new home for humanity. A second, larger colony ship is traveling six months behind the Cassiopeia, making its mission critical. Things go wrong immediately: the Cassiopeia crash-lands on Tau Ceti f, scattering the crew after they are pulled out of hypersleep early. They soon discover they are not alone: an alien organism capable of perfectly mimicking human crew members begins hunting them through the ship's dark corridors.

Yes, it's inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing, and that's among the topics I explored in this pre-launch interview with Creative Director Will Doyle, including how involved actress Lashana Lynch was and the PS5 Pro specs. Directive 8020 launches on May 12 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S and X; check out our Gamescom 2025 hands-on preview for some pre-release impressions.

Directive 8020 is the first Dark Pictures game to put its own title front and center rather than leading with 'The Dark Pictures Anthology:' as before. What does this signal about the direction of the series going forward? Is this a conscious effort to build Directive 8020 as a larger, more standalone experience in the vein of Until Dawn or The Quarry?

Will Doyle: After we wrapped season 1 of the Dark Pictures Anthology, we did an extensive player research study in preparation for Directive 8020.  This study revealed that many newcomers thought that they had to play through our games sequentially – partially due to terms like “Season.”  So, we wanted to ensure that our messaging is clear for our audiences.

For Directive 8020, we have settled on the tagline “A Dark Pictures Game”, which tells our fans that it is part of the shared universe, without suggesting that it is an essential follow-on to other games in the series.

It’s worth saying that Directive 8020 is set in the same shared world as our other titles. It is an intense, branching narrative game where your choices matter and you control a cast of characters where everyone can live or die. So very much a Dark Pictures game.

Directive 8020 also marks the first Dark Pictures title self-published by Supermassive. What drove that decision, and does it change the creative freedom you have over the project?

We’re very excited to self-publish Directive 8020. It’s a big game for us that we’ve spent a lot of time polishing and refining. We can’t wait for the fans to get hold of it on May 12th.

The game has been described as "John Carpenter's The Thing in deep space." How did that specific reference shape the design of the alien threat and the paranoia between crew members?

People have been asking us for years to make The Thing, as it works so well with our choice-driven games. It works especially well with character-driven games like ours, where you don’t know who to trust. We’ve really pushed the body horror influence of The Thing, too. Lots of eyes, teeth, bones, and gore.

It’s an ever-changing creature that goes through many cycles and reinforces the paranoia between the crew. You don’t know what the creature wants, and that is intriguing

Previous Dark Pictures games were sometimes criticized for being too close to walking simulators. With Directive 8020 introducing real-time stealth and live combat, how did you balance expanding the gameplay while keeping the experience accessible to existing fans of the series who are primarily there for the story?

We wanted to keep upping the fear. There’s nothing scarier than when you are being hunted by a creature in real time. However, we stop it being relentless and sprinkle it through the game alongside the narrative parts to create a unique tempo.

A key thing is that we want to allow the player to play the game how they want. Directive 8020 does feature these intense encounters with real-time threats, but these moments can be tailored to your liking using difficulty and accessibility settings. On the easiest difficulty setting, your character can always exploit a very forgiving parry mechanic when cornered. We also offer a custom difficulty mode where you can tailor the encounters to your own preferences – for example, playing QTEs on Hard, but setting the parries for real-time threats to Easy.

Turning Points is a significant addition to the formula, allowing players to rewind to key decisions. Were you not worried that this undermines the weight of choices, which has always been a core tension in Dark Pictures games?

If you want to play the original way, where every choice is irreversible and there are no second chances, we have a survivor mode that lets you see the Turning Points decision tree but turns off rewinds. We know that many players like to live or die by their decisions and will use this mode – there is a trophy for this too! But for other players, they have the freedom to rewind whenever they want.

This is based on us wanting to be more graceful with players time. Turning Points allows them to jump exactly where they wanted to go and makes it easier to see the range of choices available. This was aways a bit of a mystery before.

The inventory system — the multifunctional utility strap with tools like the scanner and wedge tool — sounds like it gives players more agency than in past Dark Pictures entries. How do those tools interact with the branching narrative? Can a wrong tool choice get a character killed?

It’s not really that kind of game. These tools are there to help rather than hinder. For example, the use of the scanner and utility strap remote control are mainly there to give you options in stealth and to help with puzzles and secrets. The messenger allows you to make choices that change character opinions that has a big impact on relationships.

The game is divided into eight episodes, each roughly an hour long. Was that a deliberate structural decision, and does it affect how the branching narrative is designed compared to previous entries?

Yes, it was a deliberate decision to structure the game like this. The main reason is again being graceful with players time. We wanted players to be able to sit down and have a similar experience to a TV show episode. This is a fixed amount of time with a range of exciting content that ends on a high note.

Are there any changes to the couch-co-op movie night mode compared to your previous games?

The main thing is that we are bringing the couch-co-op movie night mode online. This will be in a free post launch update. It’s always been the most popular of our multiplayer modes, so we wanted to bring it online.

Lashana Lynch is a high-profile casting choice. How involved was she in shaping the character of Young beyond the performance itself, and what does casting of that caliber bring to a game like this?

She was brilliant! We wanted a British female lead for Directive 8020 and we were delighted to get Lashana on board. She’s very much on the top of her game, having starred in The Day of the Jackal, The Woman King, Captain Marvel and the 007 franchise. So, we felt very lucky to get her to join us.

Every actor brings something of themselves into the role. Lashana has a confidence and sense of humor that really helped bring the character of Young to life. 

Are you targeting 60 frames per second on PS5 Pro? Will you take advantage of the new PSSR 2.0?

Yes, we are targeting 60 frames in performance mode and yes, we’re looking to take advantage of the quality offered with the new PSSR 2.0.

Thank you for your time.

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