Directive 8020 review – Until Dawn in space

The latest entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology series journeys into outer space for the first time, with a story influenced by The Thing.

Surrey-based studio, Supermassive Games have been making interactive movies like Until Dawn for over a decade now. After an unexplained falling out with Sony they moved on to making their own self-published horror titles, including The Quarry and The Dark Pictures Anthology series. At one point the latter was seeing new entries every year, but this is the first one since 2023’s Switchback VR – the last flatscreen entry being the prior year’s The Devil In Me.

All the games follow the same basic premise of Until Dawn, albeit with new multiplayer features that allow you to make decisions as a sort of co-op game with other players (although it’s only local multiplayer at launch, with the online option coming later). That helps liven up what can feel like quite dry, binary decisions – which are also interspersed with typical video game interactions like exploration, puzzle solving, and stealth.

All these same techniques are at work in Directive 8020, Supermassive’s new sci-fi horror, which takes its cues from Aliens and The Thing, both of which make excellent starting points. In a plot that’s also surprisingly similar in set up to the recent Aphelion, Earth is once again in the final throes of climate breakdown, only this time humanity’s last hope is Tau Ceti f, an actual recently discovered exoplanet that’s several times bigger than Earth and appears to have an ecology conducive to human survival.

In a bid to set up an outpost there, two ships leave Earth. The first is the Cassiopeia, which is tasked with scouting out the planet and ensuring it’s suitability, while the second carries thousands of colonists ready to make it their new home. The game focuses on the Cassiopeia, and the crew of trope-laden caricatures that inhabits it.

Aboard you’ll find a dramatis personae that includes arrogant billionaire LaMarcus Williams, who’s bankrolled the mission and has an unsavoury money making private agenda; his old friend and grizzled space hero Nolan Stafford; rising star astronaut Brianna Young, whose now deceased dad made Nolan promise to take care of her; and genius physicist, as well as designer of the Cassiopeia itself, Laura Eisele.

When the game begins they’re all in hyper sleep, riding out the four year journey from Earth. That’s when things start to go wrong, a meteorite perforating the ship and unbeknownst to those onboard, introducing a rogue biological element to its darkened walkways and crawl spaces. As the crew start waking up, they discover a spacecraft riven with glitches and unexplained systems errors, along with one mangled body and another teammate missing somewhere in the ship’s dimly lit interstices.

Figuring out what’s going on requires a great deal of walking around those gloomy interiors, sometimes in search of clues, and often in service of simple find-the-battery puzzles or stealth sections. The level of wreckage in every area of the ship means you’ll regularly be crouch-walking through access tunnels, vaulting waist high barriers, rerouting power to doors so you can progress, and bracing yourself for jump scares.

Where Until Dawn had its Butterfly Effect, a visual representation of the long and short term effects of each decision you made, Directive 8020 has Turning Points. While they offer similar clarity as to the outcome of each choice, here you can rewind back to any of them at any time, so if you get somebody killed or regret a particular decision, you can simply skip back and see what would have happened if things had gone differently.

While you can turn that off, making each choice final, it’s a generous facility for getting to know the game’s systems and possibilities, without having to keep restarting, as you did in Until Dawn. As in that game, though, it quickly becomes obvious that seemingly innocuous choices can have far reaching implications, and while it’s interesting to be able to retrace your steps and try things again, it also highlights one of the game’s most obvious flaws.

Like its predecessors, the paucity of information available to you when you make decisions, some of which turn out to be pivotal. That might be choosing one of two crew members to send as back-up for the commander, or whether to affirm someone’s opinion or challenge it, but you’re making those selections without enough context for a meaningful choice. It often feels as though you’re effectively just tossing a coin and waiting to see what happens with the result.

Many of the scenes you participate in are similar. Because there are regular flashbacks and flashes forward in time, the game frequently swapping from character to character in the first few of its eight chapters, you’ll often find yourself heading for a waypoint or avoiding someone stalking you without any understanding of why you’re doing it or what’s going on. It makes it hard to evolve much sympathy with any of its leads when you’re hopping between them every few minutes.

Still, it does all make sense in the end, and the ability to skip back to all the game’s various Turning Points means once you’ve played it through once the context for your actions is clearer and, as in Until Dawn, experimenting with different potential outcomes becomes the meat of its entertainment. That’s just as well, because much of the game is rigidly linear, the narrow corridors available to you only ever giving way to brief asides into dead ends revealing secrets in the form of crew member vlogs.

There’re a scattering of mildly spooky moments and the alien entity’s ability to mimic humans creates some tension, where you try and work out who you can trust. There’s also a good twist or two, and a tricky choice involving the game’s titular directive, but the majority of your time is spent walking darkened passageways, your agency limited to two-option conversational choices. It’s a fundamentally on-rails experience and that proves to be a hard fact to disguise.

Still, it moves at a reasonable pace and has the rigorously high production values of a triple-A game, its voice-acting and backdrops all of the highest quality. It’s really just the limitations of its genre that hamper its efforts, the lack of real control and sense that your decisions are more random than strategic. Still, gamifying its plot by letting you return to any past choice is an inspired innovation that works well for a genre that’s in danger of feeling a little old fashioned.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £39.99
Publisher: Supermassive Games
Developer: Supermassive Games
Release Date: 12th May 2026
Age Rating: 18

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

Comments


Add as preferred source