Directive 8020 marks a stark turn from Supermassive Games’ usual fare of interactive drama experiences, this time set in space with far more player agency in how events unfold.
I got the chance to speak with developers at Supermassive Games about their forthcoming horror title, and even got some hands-on time with an early version at Summer Game Fest.
I’m very familiar with the rest of Supermassive’s lineup — my friends and I love playing the Dark Pictures Anthology together on game nights — so I was confident that I knew what I was in for when I sat down to give Directive 8020 a go.
As it turns out, I was wrong. After a brief cutscene, I was dropped head-first into a conflict between two characters and their mimics, alien beings who have altered their appearance to look exactly like the human crew members aboard the colony ship Cassiopeia.
Directive 8020 forces players to fight or flee from aliens
In this section of the game, I fully controlled my character, who was hiding from a mimic that’d let its monstrous true form show. While most conflicts in Supermassive’s games resolve with quick-time events, this time, players are fully inserted into an action-adventure experience, forced to fight, flee, or distract the mimics to get away safely.
It places far more responsibility into the hands of the player, which I was clearly not anticipating. I could use a scanner to see where the monster was skulking in the darkness, as well as a cattle prod to shock it if I ended up in an encounter.
“We call this ‘threatening exploration,’ and we’ve been trying to get there for a number of years, but if you try and force it into a game after it’s been designed, it comes with a whole host of problems. So we’ve had to stop ourselves every time.
“Now, you’ve got direct control of the character, and when something happens, it can feel much scarier and it’s a chance to do different stuff. You can see the Hunter appear through the floor and, ’cause it can move through the growth and stuff. It’s a big step forward for us. It’s something we wanted to do for a long time.
Devs at Supermassive told us they describe Directive 8020 as ‘The Thing’ in space.
There were also options to distract the mimic and keep it busy while the player scuttles off to a safer area. I chose the more violent route, although I ended up dying anyway.
My character finally made it to the rest of the squad, where I was then tasked with choosing whether or not a certain crewmember — who was, by all rights, acting mad sus — lived or died. Was he a mimic, or was he a human? I chose to get rid of the possibility altogether, and it turned out he was actually a human… but, depending on my choices earlier in the game, his identity could have been completely different.
“We keep saying this is our version of The Thing in space,” McDonald continued.
“How twisted that is, the body horror elements. We’ve changed the design of the monster. We gave ourselves an extra couple of years in this game to really take the time to iterate and make it as good as it needs to be.
“We’ve changed it over time, and there’s actually different versions of the Hunter you’ll see. And there’s also like half-versions where it’s half-transformed into a human and it’s really nasty. There’s a lot of variation.”
Supermassive GamesThe team at Supermassive Games took inspiration from a ton of popular horror films and games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and more.
During our chat, McDonald referenced movies like Event Horizon and the Alien films, making sure to mention that the entire team at Supermassive are big fans of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill games.
Directive 8020 has eight, hour-long episodes with many branching paths
As told by Supermassive’s Dan McDonald, players’ choices directly impact events that happen later on in the game, opening up new paths that they can navigate to and from at any time. Directive 8020 boasts a Turning Point menu not unlike that of Detroit: Become Human, allowing players to look back at their choices and drop in the timeline at any point to see what happens if they pick a different option.
This, McDonald said, is part of what makes the game so long. He told us that Directive 8020 will have eight episodes, which are about an hour long each. But given all the branching paths, it could take you much, much longer to see the full story.
“We’ve got huge amounts of branching, and with the turning points, we expect players to get to that branching a lot more easily. It’s not that they have to go and do a whole ‘nother playthrough to see it all — they can go back to a moment and make a different choice and move on with it.
“The way that we’ve structured it, and you might have seen it briefly in the Turning Point screen, there’s eight episodes. Now, we’re more mimicking a high-end TV series, like an HBO, Netflix, or Amazon Prime show. Those are around an hour long each, and there’s eight of them. We’ve done that for a whole host of reasons, but also when you’re playing with your friends, as it’s a bigger game now, maybe you wanna stop before you play tomorrow or next week.”
Supermassive GamesPlayers’ decisions early in the game will affect the storyline later on.
Play with up to five friends on one console or online
This multiplayer experience is very important to Supermassive for Directive 8020, which is why they’ve implemented several difficulty levels and options for players who might be new to gaming or want a simpler experience.
“You can change the settings and have a much more classic experience,” McDonald said. “You saw the moment where you had the wedge tool, and you can fight off the monster. If you have it on hard, it’s gonna work once, and then that’s it. But on easy, it will keep recharging really quickly, and you can keep reusing it. Then, if you change the accessibility options, you can make it so it never fails.
“The crew is about 10 people. There’s only five playable characters, plus there’s actually another one in the prologue that’s part of the mission as well. Of course, they die — we always do that, kill off the early ones.
“But yes, you have that cast of five characters, so you can have a five-player movie night. But we’ve changed it this time so that now, you can do that online, as well. You can have five people
on one machine, or five people on five different machines, or any combination. We really wanna facilitate how you wanna play with your friends and family.”
Supermassive GamesSupermassive Games is making playing with friends easier than ever.
“We’ve always wanted to go to space”
Of course, one of the most pressing questions on our minds was about the decision to take the storyline to space. All of Supermassive’s games are connected in some way, and that hasn’t changed in Directive 8020.
In fact, they told us they’d always wanted to go to space, and said that they made sure to connect the game to real-life events like all their other titles.
“All of our games have real-world connections. Even this does. When we started the series, we knew in a good level of detail what the first four games were gonna be. But we also had a high level of detail for the next four. And we were working on some even further beyond that, as well. But we’ve moved some of those around and twisted it, and changed the order a bit. But we always knew we were going to space. We always knew.”
“There are a couple of real-world links for this game. [Directive 8020] is a real-world directive. It’s really quite hard to find now. And it might have been NASA just doing a thought experiment, you know? We’ll never know. It’s to do with, if you have contact with an alien presence and creature quarantining and not bringing it back to earth.”
Supermassive GamesDirective 8020 is aiming to be more frightening than any of its predecessors.
McDonald also mentioned the US’s first space missions, citing Apollo 10, which was a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the eventual moon landing, saying the crew of the Cassiopeia was given a similar order.
“They had the capability to land on the moon, but they didn’t have the fuel to land on the moon. They were supposed to fly by and then come home. And it purposefully wasn’t fueled up. That’s the same for this mission — they’re not supposed to land.”
From the small snippet that I got to experience at Summer Game Fest, I found Directive 8020 to be a far more terrifying experience than other Supermassive games. Being in full control of your character completely changes things and offers far more ways to get scared. I anticipate that this will be a big hit at game nights — and since it drops on October 2, 2025, you’ll have the entire month of spooky season to enjoy it with your buddies.
