Directive 8020

We sit down and review Directive 8020. The next in the bigger Dark Pictures Anthology universe. Here is our review of Directive 8020.

We are finally able to launch into space with a new horror experience, as Directive 8020 has finally hit the PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC in its full form. We had a chance to see all that Supermassive Games had to offer in this latest outing into The Dark Pictures Anthology to see if we can still scream in space. Well, a fictional space and future that we have yet to see out there in the real world. That is why we get titles like Directive 8020, so we can all fear the unknown and be ready to fight back if things do go sideways. Something that truly happens in the game, and now we are here with our review to let you know if you should take flight with this experience, or let it sleep forever in the cryochambers that we will need to safely travel the universe out there and find these horrific aliens that we usually find in our sci-fi stories.

Story

Welcome aboard the Cassiopeia. A new deep-space science ship has been sent out to look for new planets that humans can invade. Well, more than they can head out to and colonize when Earth has run its course. In Directive 8020, we get to experience the lives, and maybe deaths, of the various members of the crew as they are on this voyage. One that should be of scientific discovery, but it looks as if life has other plans. Well, more of a lifeform that has found its way onto the ship and has a way to mimic other living beings. Can we make the correct choices to get home safely, or will we watch as all of the crew slowly meet an end and the mission becomes a failure? The choices will always be ours…

Hated

I am going to get one of the bigger things out of the way, Directive 8020 feels insanely short for this style of game. Part of this is that even with a lot of exploring and finding hidden secrets, it only took me about seven to eight hours to get to the end. That sounds like a lot, until you realize that a good portion of this is just watching the game play out consequences based on past actions, with little to no reasoning why, in the moment, they are going down the way they are. I get that Directive 8020 is a narrative game and falls into the choose-your-own-adventure style, but there were so many action sequences that played out based on a dialog choice I made episodes before. I know other titles that the team has made have offered up the chance to play through those sections instead of just watching them, so it feels like a step backward to not allow for that in this one. Let me feel and see the consequences instead of feeling like I am being told about them. Let this feel less like I am watching someone else play the game, and just let me play. Something I thought we would see after The Quarry and The Casting Of Frank Stone, instead of stepping back to what we had many times over before.

Going along with that, and something you can see in the full gameplay we have for Directive 8020 below, some choices happened out of nowhere and just for exploring. Not a terrible thing in general, but sometimes this happened with no way to back out, even if the game and character could. Especially, when there is a specific game mechanic that comes up at the beginning that states we will have to actively press and hold a button at points we cannot move back from without using the rewind function. There was a point where I was searching for one of the crew members, and I was just taking in the area. I made one slight step forward, and then I was locked into a path I did not want to go down. Another time in Directive 8020, I saw something that was obviously one of the entities, but because I took a step the wrong way with the controller, the game actually made me have to slowly walk toward them from across the room. A room I could have walked through or stealth-walked through without needing the interaction. Yes, there is a way to go back and change that, but when rules are dictated at the start, and then the game does not have to follow through, that feels like more of a fault than it is a feature.

Lastly, and this one will get different mileage depending on your story tastes, but the story for Directive 8020 just felt like something we have seen a few times before. Not just the premise, as it is very Aliens and The Thing coded from the videos we had leading up to launch, but it truly felt like it was playing things by the numbers. Sometimes, to the point where it was so easy to spot the good and bad choices we had to make in the game. I will not spoil any of that, and you can watch what I did play out down the page, but the story just fell a little flat to me. Even with the bigger "twist" that was dropped near the end of the penultimate episode. A twist, to me, that made it feel like none of the choices in Directive 8020 truly mattered. It helped to explain that all of the branches of the narrative always started to take the shape of a family tree in the American South, but there felt like there was so much more they could have done. Especially after the game was pushed out from the original launch. Again, that is for me, and I do take in a whole lot of Sci-Fi content out there, but this story felt like it just had to follow the same one many others have done, when it could have given us all a vastly different experience.

Loved

The reason I have for not liking a few things above in Directive 8020 all stem from one place, the creature and environmental design of this game is fucking spectacular. No question about it, and I would love to see some of it recreated in horror mazes and events in the real world. It is why I fell in love with exploring so much of the game, as the ship truly felt lived in, and there did not feel like there was any tomfoolery in the layout, as it felt like everything could truly exist out there just based on the physical location of things. It did not fully dawn on me that was truly going on in Directive 8020 until later in the game, but when I had that "Ah Ha" moment, I was able to see how much time the team put into all of this. Not just with the ship, but even the life form that we are encountering on the ship. Even when it started to feel rather familiar when it came to the story, the actual design, animations, and audio that came from it truly felt inspired. Again, I think I would fall in love with a practical design of this for any haunt, even if it was done to a third of the level of detail Supermassive Games put into all of that. That by itself would be worth the price of admission to this experience. I do not think I can stress any of that enough.

All of this also highlighted how intriguing many of the characters in Directive 8020 actually were. Ignoring the main story and focusing on them, again, felt as if the team had a solid blueprint to start from. Highlighted only more when it came to one of the newer features that was added into Directive 8020, the fact that you can have conversations with each other even when they are locked away. Even if they have been converted by the lifeform, which is a thing that happened a few times to me in the game. Each one of them felt like a real person, and not a cookie-cutter archetype that was brought to life by a great voice actor and motion capture. That would have been the easier thing to do, sure, but there were always little things like fist bumps, inside jokes, and other personality traits mixed in that were not just spelled out as we have seen in their past titles. All of this just to build up the fact that we cared if or when any of them met an early end. I was more upset by my first death in my blind play due to liking the character and not because I failed at making the correct choice. Those little things that gripped me and pulled me in, just like a good horror title should.

One last thing that I will hit on here for Directive 8020, is that I do have to give some credit to the QTEs and other basic mechanics we have to perfect while playing the game. Many of them felt like they made sense in the moment, or things like opening a door felt like it added true tension as you played the minigame to open the door as the lifeform stomped around the area. Even new things, like the stealth gameplay, worked way better than I expected them to, as that could have been something the team could have "phoned in" just to say they had it. In Directive 8020, there were parts where it started to feel like a true survival horror game, as we watched the entity move about randomly, hid behind various bits of debris, or used random things in the world to lure it away. That could have boiled down to making a basic choice or playing out a QTE, but there was only one time while playing where I felt like it was more frustrating than fun. Full disclosure on that, though, it was more to the level of tension I had already been through and just wanted the character to have a break, more than just having another one slapped on to pad the runtime. So, a good frustration as were many of these little mechanics the team placed in for us to play with.

Overview

Many of my issues with Directive 8020 definitely stem from personal preference and the levels of Sci-Fi content I consume. I will need to admit that from the start. Those who only dabble and love a fun horror title, this is going to be one for you, that is certain. It might not be a perfect game, and it does feel as if Supermassive Games left out things that worked well from their other titles, but it was still a solid experience. That might be why I also wanted more than just the eight episodes we did get. I will caution again, mainly if you are going for a no-rewind playthrough, be careful when exploring or taking in the sights. Directive 8020 will start you down a path you cannot easily walk back from, but I guess that is why there is a rewind feature during the core experience. They had to have known that players would want to look at everything they could and see just how things were being told in the environment. An environment and creature design, I desperately am begging to see on display at a theme park this Halloween. It really is that amazing.

I give Directive 8020 4 0 Death Secrets on the 0 Death Secret scale.

Directive 8020 was developed and published by Supermassive Games for the PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on May 12^th, 2026. A PlayStation copy of the game was provided by the publisher for reviewing purposes.