I'm a huge fan of cinematic horror games, a specific sub-genre that's essentially been cornered in the market by U.K. developer Supermassive Games, famous for titles like Until Dawn, The Quarry, and The Dark Pictures Anthology.
While I was in L.A. for Summer Game Fest 2025, I made sure to check out Supermassive's latest upcoming game, Directive 8020 while speaking to game director Will Doyle.
This science-fiction title is the fifth in the studio's Dark Pictures Anthology, and the first that it's self-published. It's also easily the most ambitious game the team has made, mixing in a couple of big new features that will change how players engage with the overall experience.
Directive 8020 is set far into the future, well beyond the mostly-happening-right-now backdrop of Supermassive's prior titles. With Earth dying, a group of astronauts set off in search of a new world that can house a colony.
Crash-landing on the planet Tau Ceti f, the astronauts discover that they aren't alone, with a horrifying alien tracking them down. This creature is capable of warping into various shapes, turning into a towering monster, or even assuming the form of one of the crew.
"They're put in a situation where they start off with technology on their side, using their brains to try and think their way through the situation," Doyle says. "Like a lot of classic sci-fi horror, they end up kind of losing that over the course of the story, getting stripped down to the bone where they're surviving in a more primal way by the end of it."
"For me, Aliens is probably my favorite film, and obviously I love The Thing," he adds, pointing to how the premise is unashamedly inspired by a fusion of both, while noting that the latter in particular is something that Supermassive's fans have been asking for.
Naturally, the team has pulled heavily from Ridley Scott's films to find the right visual language, aesthetic, and even color grading, looking to Alien, Prometheus, and Alien: Covenant for inspiration.
Another font was found in the cult classic Event Horizon, with Doyle pointing to the way the visuals get more and more frantically disturbing toward the end.
During the brief demo I played (at around 8 minutes, it was one of the shorter hands-on experiences I had) Supermassive immediately introduces a couple of huge new features.
These games are known for their cinematic presentation, where characters mostly just explore and solve basic puzzles when walking around, with the heavy action reserved for Quick Time Events (QTEs). Directive 8020 throws that idea out the airlock.
Pursued by a hulking alien monster, I had to guide one of the astronauts out to safety in a stealth sequence. It's extremely tense, with a couple of points where I was sure I'd be spotted, but I managed to get through safely.
When I asked Doyle how the team has gone about balancing these encounters with the more traditional elements, he admits it's been a challenge.
"Creating a cinematic experience is number one for us, and that comes with a load of considerations around pacing. Making it feel like it's part of a cinematic drama is tricky," he says.
"We've had to be very careful where we put these moments, we don't want to overload you with them," he continues, adding that "The threat escalates, the threats that you're facing change throughout the game. There are other forms."
From there, I had to make a call on whether or not to trust if someone really was human. I won't spoil the outcome, but it's clear that a huge amount of the drama in Directive 8020 is set to come from who (if anyone) is an imposter in disguise.
This also leads Doyle to discuss the second big new feature in this game, the Turning Point system.
Instead of requiring players to stick with their decisions until the end, the team is now tracking every decision you make in the game with a branching tree. At any point, players can rewind to a particular point on that tree and replay to make a different decision.
Doyle notes that the idea was partially born out of a discussion he had with his best friend, who stopped playing House of Ashes (the third Dark Pictures game) when he lost his favorite character.
Doyle adds that he knows some fans prefer to see things through to the end, and so the team is also including a "Survival" mode that disables the ability to rewind. Building on that concept, Directive 8020 is also introducing some other wild shake-ups to the formula.
The ethos of Supermassive's horror titles include the core tenet that anyone can live or die based on player decisions. While true, traditionally, at least some characters are unkillable until the final act. That's not the case here.
"This game has got something which is kind of a hidden thing to find, but we call it the 'Death Spiral,'" Doyle explains. "Early on, much earlier than any of our [other] games, everyone can wipe out. Later on, when you get towards the end of the game, in this game you can have any combination of characters alive or dead."
In total size, Doyle says Directive 8020 is comparable to 2022's The Devil in Me. The game is divided into eight episodes, each taking around 40 minutes to an hour, depending on someone's exact playstyle.
Supermassive has explored different settings before, from mountain peaks and mines to ghost ships and forgotten tombs, but the sheer difference in time makes this the most different of any of the team's games so far.
That necessitated building "everything from scratch," without reusing assets like in prior titles. The result is the longest break the series has taken, with Directive 8020 coming three years after The Devil In Me. It's also resulted in a game that looks gorgeous, with elevated visual quality in basically every aspect.
"Initially we had a very, very aggressive cadence for our games," he says, adding that the team has "loads of stories to tell" but that the focus is now more on taking the right amount of time in building for the future.
"Let's amp up everything, let's get a whole load of systems that we can then build a base for the next set of games we're doing."
"The horror genre is popping off at the moment," he adds. "A lot of our games have been inspired by really classic genres like teen horror. Horror is always an extrapolation of present-day fears."
When I asked Doyle if Supermassive Games will go back to putting out a new game a year with this second season of The Dark Pictures Anthology, he's doubtful.
"I don't think we will. These games get more and more complex to make. We want to deliver high-end experiences."
Directive 8020 is slated to launch on Oct. 2, 2025 on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC (Steam), and PlayStation 5.
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