Man, I have probably missed the dark pictures the anthology. After four items were released four years in a row, it has now been three years since the end of season one, and I have died another movie night massacre ever since. Now the series is finally back with Directive 8020: Supermassive Games' version of The Thing in Space. It loses the brand Dark Pictures Anthology, but it takes up some exciting new features.
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Dark Pictures Anthology: Every game, ranked
Which game will survive? Which is not coming? The choice is ours.
I got to play a decent piece of the upcoming cinematic survival scare at the Summer Game Fest last weekend, where I was happy to discover the studio has used these three years to give the series a complete makeover. Between the transition to Unreal Engine 5, the studio's increased focus on action games and the new Turning Points system feels Directive 8020 as if the game this team has built against the entire Dark Pictures series.
In space no one can hear you kill someone and steal their body
It's about fucking time super massively finally handled foreigners. We have had ghosts and sealing killers and the occult and even the freaking vampires, but we have never been able to experience paranoia, insulation and helplessness of horror in outer space. Directive 8020 goes full sci-fi, and as we have expected from all the super massives genre, its vibes are immaculate.
Directive 8020, like other Dark Pictures titles, leans strongly on the classics. Its story of a spaceship under the siege of an unknown foreign threat is rooted in the cosmic horror from Alien, Event Horizon, The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The prerequisite is familiar: While searching for a new planet to replace the dying earth, Cassopeia crashes on a foreign planet. Soon they are attacked by an amorphic threat that can mimic the crew by turning into them. How can you trust someone when they can be the monster in disguise? It's a classic trope for a reason, and I'm happy to see Supermassives take it.
With limited time, I was thrown right into the chaos. The crew members are dead, one is locked up under suspicion to be a foreigner, and two of the crew are attacked by their own clones. Things happen quickly, and it doesn't take long before one crew member points a gun at another, and now I have to decide whether he pulls the trigger or not.
Turning points give you more control over your own story
In the other Dark Pictures games you would decide to shoot that person or not, then you would find out if they were really the monster or not, and what the result might be, the action would go from there. Whatever happens, and it doesn't go back – at least not until your next Playthrough.
You can still play directive 8020 so. I will probably do it, because I like to have my own cannon version of the story that is personal to me, mistakes and everything. But with the new turning points you have the freedom to change your choices whenever you want. You can rewind, redo and try again. It is a tool that gives you outstanding control over the story, if there is something you want.
The presentation of turning points is really cool. The timeline for the story is posted in a long chain, which every decision is spreading, creating a giant web of causes and effects. You can examine the timeline to get a better idea of how your choices affected the story (which was sometimes quite opaque in previous titles), but you can also travel back to all previous turning point and change your decision. You have to continue the story from there to see what changes – you can't just jump back to where you would get characters back to life – but it's a great way to see more of the story without having to play the whole game.
Takes more clues from survival fright
The four Dark Pictures games have slowly added more and more character control to each game, so you can not only make choices for the characters but also explore the scenes with them. Directive 8020 takes even longer with sequences that would be inseparable from modern survival scares such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
I played a stealth sequence where a character falls in a podboat on the ship and is persecuted by a scary, xenomor-like strange. When the monster patrols take control of the character to stealthily take you from one end of the room to the other. You need time on your movements when the foreigner's back is turned, hide when it comes close and throw objects you pick up from the ground to distract it. In this scene, Directive 8020 Directive is transformed into a third person survival game, the only difference is that if the monster catches you, you will not just reload your last save a try again.
It's a huge difference. I have often complained about how horror games lose all its excitement when the monster catches you and you simply start at the last checkpoint. There is no fear of being chased when you know it doesn't matter if you get stuck. But in Directive 8020 do matter.
You may not die right away. I let the creature catch me just before I could get to the exit, which triggered a cutting scene of my character that was beaten and beaten. He manages to crawl away, but he now has an injury that will undoubtedly come up again and change the course in his story, possibly even help to determine if he lives or dies.
If you hate it, the turning point system will let you go back and try again like all other games. But if you are brave enough to just let things play however they can, these game sequences add a whole new layer of consequences to history. It's not just election A or B; Stuck by the monster near the end can have a completely different result than getting stuck directly. How it captures you can change what damage you maintain. It is a more complicated web of turning points than ever before, and it is everything documented for you in a nice, easy -to -understand flow schedule.
There has been a long wait for the beginning of season two, but so far it looks like it will be worth it. Thanks to the new engine, characters and environments look more realistic than ever, and with extra time Supermassive has been able to refine the formula for its most potent version yet. They had me on the thing, but after seeing all the big changes I have a feeling that it will be the best entry into the series so far.
