With Directive 8020, Supermassive is evolving the Dark Pictures formula in unexpected ways

Supermassive Games faces a dilemma that many other developers would envy: It makes games that are popular with people who don’t play games.

The British developer, based in Guildford, Surrey, is probably best known for its PlayStation horror hit, Until Dawn. The game, which was adapted for the silver screen earlier this year, was popular with both hardcore players, and fostered a new, more casual audience.

For its next game, Directive 8020, action takes a much greater focus. So, how has the studio balanced the more advanced action gameplay while making sure its loyal casual audience can also experience the new story?

“You’ve hit the nail on the head there,” McDonald said. “Because we cover so many different genres, you don’t have to play them all; they’re not sequels to each other. If you like ghost ships, play Man of Medan. If you’re a sci-fi fan, we’ve got you covered with this one.”

I recently played a short sequence from the game, which introduced the most notable change to the series in years: tangible threat during exploration.

“In previous games, when you’ve been exploring the scenes and finding the clues, you’ve always been largely safe,” said McDonald. “Now, as you’ve seen, we have a hunter that can kill you at any moment.”

That hunter stalked us as we attempted to escape to a safe area of the ship. A Batman-style detective vision gave us glimpses of the monster as we slowly peeked around corners and waited for our moment to run. It’s very Alien, and it’s not being shy about it.

While my time with Directive 8020 was brief, the inclusion of a constantly moving threat will certainly inject a level of fear into the game’s puzzles and exploratory moments. We wonder if players who love to spend as much time as possible in each of these scenes, making sure they’ve combed over every inch, will find it frustrating that they could die at any second, but that’s a possibility that Supergiant has accounted for with another of the game’s new mechanics.

“It gives us a lot more opportunities to scare the player,” McDonald joked. The game’s controls have been overhauled from previous entries in order to support this new gameplay. It’s practically a third-person action game. However, Supermassive is keen to repeat that this is a Supermassive game, and that means the story choices, relationships, and multiple endings are intact.

Not only that, Directive 8020 introduces a new twist to the formula, Turning Points. “Now that we’ve made it so that you can die in a lot more places, we understand that can be quite frustrating, especially when you want to explore the game’s systems. So with Turning Points, you can rewind to a moment that’s just happened and redo it, or make a different choice.

“In previous games, when you’ve been exploring the scenes and finding the clues, you’ve always been largely safe. Now, as you’ve seen, we have a hunter that can kill you at any moment.”

“We’ve got it across the whole game, so you can rewind to any moment, a minute ago or an hour ago, or right back to the start, you don’t lose your progress.”

The Turning Point map, which is like a spiderweb of storyboards, is filled in as the players explore all of them. “It’s like a collection mechanic. You can see all of the content. We always have different branching endings, and we know our players want to experience that stuff.

McDonald tells me that Supermassive grew frustrated that players would previously have to start the whole game again, or follow fan-made guides to see all of the content in the game. This time, they’ve made the guide for you.

The series’ classic gameplay is still there, but Supermassive wanted to give as many options as possible to players. This feels key, especially with the new action focus. The series has been rather rigid about how deaths affect the outcome of its games. With death occurring more frequently thanks to the heightened action, the ability to rewind, redo, or set off on a different path entirely is a perfect antidote to the potential outcome of players running past the monsters and missing content.

According to Supermassive Games, one playthrough of Directive 8020 will last around eight hours; however, it claims that to fully fill out the Turning Point map could take over 40 hours.

The game stars Lashana Lynch, who is the co-pilot of the Cassiopeia, the game’s main setting. While we were only shown a brief glimpse of her performance, her real-life performance and the series’ history of effectively utilizing its Hollywood talent give us confidence for the rest of the game.

Directive 8020 is the sixteenth project worked on by Supermassive Games in the decade since Until Dawn was released. For some of the industry’s biggest developers, that’s the length of time it takes to make just one entry in a franchise. So what is it that keeps the Supermassive team so consistent, and do they think they’ve successfully carved out their niche?

“I think there’s space for all kinds of development in this industry,” McDonald tells us. “There’s the big monster that’s coming out next year that everyone’s going to buy and everyone’s going to pay attention to, you can’t get away from that.

“You have to find your own niche, your own workflow, and your own focus. This is still a Dark Pictures game, it still has that cinematic look, it still has the beautiful facial animations, really high-quality casting, and we believe that’s what makes us stand out, as well as the great horror we can do.”