Supermassive Games’ The Dark Pictures Anthology series is back this year with a science fiction horror adventure that’s bound to leave players terrifyingly gobsmacked, Directive 8020.
Starring Captain Marvel’s Lashana Lynch, the game follows a colony ship crash-landing on an alien planet far away from home. As all sci-fi horror goes, this narrative also features hostile alien entities hunting the surviving crew, but the creatures can shapeshift to impersonate any crewmate.
The narrative is somewhat similar to Dead Space, although it was a lot more psychological in its horror approach. But the game feels more like a cult horror favorite, that was helmed by a legendary director.
Directive 8020’s creatures feel like a page out of John Carpenter’s The Thing
If you’re a fan of horror, you’d know just how much of an influence John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing, had on horror games, and Directive 8020 doesn’t shy away from that influence one bit.
The developers were influenced by The Thing while making their science-fiction horror adventure, with creative director Will Doyle describing the game as “John Carpenter’s The Thing in deep space”, in an exclusive interview with us, FandomWire. Here’s what he had to say:
Think of it as John Carpenter’s The Thing in deep space. Hunted by an alien capable of mimicking its prey, the crew of the Cassiopeia must outwit their pursuers to survive. Players need to evade real-time threats and decide who to trust when anyone could be a deadly extraterrestrial impostor.
The settings for Directive 8020 and The Thing are different, with the former being in space and the latter being on Earth. But the similarities are certainly there, especially in the creature department. John Carpenter’s cult horror classic’s primary antagonist was an organism that could shapeshift into its victims.
Directive 8020’s The Mimic is very similar in the sense that it can also take the shape of a human and pose as a crewmate, which adds another level of fear factor to the narrative sections of the game. But Will Doyle assured that it’s not the only threat that players will face.
Obviously, I don’t want to spoil things too much, but I can reveal that you’ll face multiple threats. This creature can assume human form and pose as any one of your crew, so in the more narrative sections of the game, it’s sometimes up to you to figure out who is a mimic and who is real.
When I first watched the trailer for Directive 8020, it felt more like a spiritual successor to Dead Space since it’s a survival horror title, but with the information about the malevolent alien forces assuming a second skin in the form of a human, it feels much more like The Thing than I was prepared for.
Of course, the game wasn’t only inspired by The Thing, as it also took some pages out of other sci-fi horror flicks such as Event Horizon and Alien, but the atmosphere and the creatures to me sure do feel like it was John Carpenter’s brainchild, which, being a huge sci-fi horror fan, makes me giddy.
The second season of The Dark Pictures Anthology launches this year with Directive 8020
While Directive 8020 is the fifth entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology, it also marks the beginning of the second season of the series, ushering in a new era of horror titles filled with choice-based gameplay and compelling narratives as we know and love.
Although the game features a single-player mode, Supermassive Games is adding a fresh new flair to the multiplayer experience by introducing a terrifying new twist that feels like Among Us overdosing on horror.
Other than that, creative director Will Doyle has also confirmed in an interview with Gamespot that Supermassive Games will keep pumping out The Dark Pictures titles “as long as people keep buying them.” So, expect more horror goodness from the developer in the future.
Directive 8020 arrives on October 2, 2025, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
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