Directive 8020 Review: Sci-fi Dark Pictures

A little Thing and a little Alien makes a whole lot of nothing.

Directive 8020 is the latest from Supermassive Games, the studio most famous for interactive horror titles including Until Dawn and The Quarry. This one, however, sits within Bandai Namco’s Dark Pictures anthology, and as such was teased way back in 2022 at the conclusion of The Devil in Me.

The first sci-fi offering of the anthology, Directive 8020 has had me highly interested since its first tease — and it may be for that reason that I find myself a tad disappointed with the finished product.

Directive 8020 is set in a dystopian 2073, and as per usual, we’ve done bad by the Earth. With resources dwindling, we set off into the stars in hopes of finding another planet to harvest… and hopefully not ravage. Thus, the Cassiopeia, an advanced scientific scout ship that is meant to survey our next best hope: Tau Ceti f. Our crew is meant to pave the way for a larger colony ship, the Andromeda, if we find that all is well. Spoilers, but not really: things aren’t well.

Directive 8020 follows a formula similar to other Supermassive titles, and relies upon a narrative that bounces between the present day and instances hours away. I believe these jumps are meant to assist with pacing issues, though they can only go so far.

The heavy sci-fi premise of Directive 8020 means that most of the crew is in cryo when the alien entity initially comes on board. This, combined with aforementioned time jumps mean we don’t really get to know the characters before they’re potentially slaughtered. Tension, as a result, is lessened.

Beyond that, core gameplay consists of crouching and crawling through shafts, or crouching to stealth around enemies who are stalking you; in the case of the latter, you generally evade by closely following your hunter. While these sequences are initially terrifying, their repetition reduces this feeling with each new encounter. On top of this, you’ll encounter random quicktime prompts, though you can enter accessibility options to make these as easy or difficult as you prefer.

While you’re crouching — or rather, exploring — you’ll also have access to three key commands: a quest beacon, a scanner, and text messages between crew members. While the former is self-explanatory, the latter two options help to flesh out narrative. While text messages help to get a sense of where everyone is at, your scanner is used to identify power junctions and the like, useful for both puzzles and progress and also personal (and secretive) logs.

These same logs are tracked in a new menu system that also highlights Turning Points, crucial junctions in the story that literally mean life or death. Ever the Dark Pictures fan, I chose to accept my fate and turn off a rewind feature that allows for the opportunity to go back and undo deaths you encounter. Sadly, though, I was unable to try out the feature after completing the story — the difficulty tooltip reads “if you survive to the game’s ending, Turning Points are unlocked to explore the story,” and I decided to go kamikaze after failing the umpteenth stealth section that meant life or death. At least let me skip cutscenes on my second playthrough, Supermassive.

In my unique situation, that means I’m left with no other choice than to start an entirely new game to explore branches in narrative. I don’t really want to do that any time soon as I didn’t find it particularly engaging. Hyped as a combination of the horror of Alien and the paranoia of The Thing, Directive 8020 does neither well.

Coming in at around four hours long, it takes about two of those before replicating something out of The Thing, and only briefly at that, things constantly feel choppy narrative beats are not earned. A twist near the end plays into Turning Points, but again, doesn’t generate the excitement from me I think Supermassive was hoping for.

I played single-player exclusively, but that said, I struggle to see how groups will find this as enjoyable as other Dark Pictures titles. There are less big, dangerous choices to be made and far more opportunities to die because you’re not good at stealth, or stealth and management of scanning and puzzles at the same time. Fans of Supermassive will find enough here to justify a purchase, though I’m in that camp myself and finished things up hoping for a tighter experience.   

The Dark Pictures Directive 8020 is available now on Windows PC, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and PS5.

Directive 8020 was reviewed using a promotional code on PS5, streamed remotely on Xbox ROG Ally X, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.