Supermassive Games, known for Until Dawn and the Dark Pictures anthology, has made another homage to the entire horror film genre. Carpenter’s paranoid The Thing, the claustrophobic Alien, and the flirting with expectations of Event Horizon—all rolled into one. While the ambitions are high, the result is predictable: it’s certainly not a masterpiece that will stand alongside the genre’s apostles. But it’s also far from a boring way to spend a couple of evenings! Let’s see what the leading creators of interactive cinema have come up with this time.
Just like the good old days
Space horror is an extremely specific genre. And, frankly, repetitive. Cold images, confined corridors, and some menacing enemy who can’t be killed, and sometimes whose nature can’t even be understood. But no matter what hell is going on around them, people must always be at the center of the narrative. Fear, selflessness, mistakes, and betrayal. This is precisely what Directive 8020 was supposed to be about
Welcome aboard the Cassiopeia, a spaceship ploughing through the void of space, heading for a planet far, far away. Can you guess what’s there? That’s right: a potential new home for all of humanity, as Earth is rapidly spiraling into the abyss. Our crew is supposed to arrive six months ahead of the colonists, scout out the situation, and calmly await the arrival of everyone else. But just off the coast, a meteorite pierces the ship’s hull, and something invades. It’s literally a Carpenter-esque creature: an alien lifeform infests the ship’s compartments with terrifying organic growths and copies the crew members’ appearance.\
In the prologue, the game introduces two engineers, Carter and Simms. They ensure the crew’s prolonged slumber doesn’t become permanent. This is a standard Supermassive trope: we’re dealing with the very characters who are not destined to survive the story’s opening. However, it’s a clever decision: the prologue allows the player to get accustomed to the ship’s environment, understand the scale of the threat, and gain exposition without risking the lives of the characters, whose deaths could be fatal to the desired outcome. After the technicians are killed, the main team of officers takes over, and the Cassiopeia makes an emergency landing on Tau Ceti f.
A brave team must repair the ship, understand the nature of the threat, and prevent it from destroying the entire crew. The concept is strong: isolation, mistrust, and total paranoia. Is the neighbor at the dinner table a person or a space creature with his face? But, by turning to timeless horror classics, the game automatically promises us a lot. It’s completely wasted now.
These guys
The Cassiopeia crew is a diverse group, each with their own role: commander, pilot, officer, scientist, engineer, and ship’s doctor. The actors are well-chosen and even have some status. For example, Lashana Lynch (pilot Young) starred in the Bond film No Time to Die and several other Hollywood blockbusters.
The characters’ personalities are revealed gradually, as if between the lines—through notes and small references in dialogue. These people have known each other for a long time, and then one of them casually mentions an important event in their friend’s life. It feels quite natural: Supermassive Games has honed this technique well in previous projects.
However, the characters lack any depth. The rushed exposition of the first few episodes dumps a flood of information on the player about where everyone is from, what they believe, and how they ended up on the ship—it’s more about establishing their personalities than defining them. When the characters are forced to make tough decisions, these scenes don’t work properly. You catch yourself thinking that all these people are somehow irrelevant: whether they die or survive—what difference does it make? Yet the choices are framed as if they require reflection and self-doubt. Perhaps the writers should have invested more soul in the characters and given them time for simple human interaction.
The uncanny valley problem exacerbates the situation. The project looks good technically, and the facial expression capture is generally spot-on. The characters’ emotions are captured easily and accurately. However, at times, it’s striking that the proprietary technology is far from ideal: in moments of extreme horror or grief, the characters’ faces resemble grimaces. Sometimes, they’re quite grotesque.
Well, a ship is a ship.
Think back to the famous examples of space horror in games. The Ishimura from Dead Space—an industrial metal organism, meticulously crafted down to the smallest detail. The devastated and rusting Sevastopol station from Alien: Isolation, the underwater Pathos II from SOMA—these locations had their own character, they were memorable. They were, if you will, one of the leading characters, a kind of face of the project.
Cassiopeia simply exists. It’s a space you can move through. Gray metal corridors, functional cabins, office spaces—everything is in place, raising no particular questions, but it’s also completely devoid of any personality. Perhaps the creators’ biggest miscalculation is conveying scale. As in other Supermassive Games games, various scenes chaotically throw the player from location to location. And after eight hours of play, it’s impossible to get a sense of just how big this ship is.
The second half of the game makes up for this oversight, but only partially. When the vile organics begin to take over the compartments, the sterile metal environment finally transforms into something alive and disgustingly disturbing. On the other hand, aren’t you tired of those disgusting organics you’ve probably seen in a hundred other games and films? Here, they’re exactly the same: fleshy, deformed growths that look like they could transmit some kind of infection.
And here we have it like in Detroit
Another signature Supermassive technique is a branching plot with consequences and multiple endings. Before releasing Directive 8020, the team felt like they were replaying Detroit: Become Human and had a revelation: they needed to add some transparency to this complex system. Now, at any moment, the player can review the structure of their decisions: which paths have already been opened, where paths diverge, and where they converge again. At key moments, they can quickly understand how to play the game differently and what they need to do to achieve that.
This isn’t the first new feature, but the nature of replayability fundamentally changes the game. There’s a tiny bug in people’s psychology—they enjoy filling boxes with checkboxes, like sticker albums. In the studio’s previous games, the sense of “What if?” existed only abstractly. Players understood that the game could be played differently, but to do so required remembering their decisions in the previous playthrough. Now, the system simply shows you a map and offers to return to any point in the story. Satisfying your curiosity has become much easier, and we offer our condolences to completionists: fully uncovering the story will stretch the playthrough a good three times, to 25 hours.
This system does have a downside. The game overly insists on rewinding! A choice is made in the third episode, and the consequences won’t occur until the fifth. But the interface immediately prompts you to go back and change your mind. This breaks immersion and undermines your sense of responsibility for your choices: the game constantly reminds you that everything is happening as if it were just a fantasy. Kudos to the developers—they understood this problem. In “Survival” mode, decision branches can be disabled, making the plot final and irreversible. In our opinion, this is the best option for a first playthrough with maximum immersion—especially if you later watch the other endings on video sharing sites (we, by the way, do that too).
Dialogue choices work as usual. In addition to key dilemmas, there’s a role-playing element: a host of minor dialogue and actions, each of which impacts relationships within the team. The characters’ reputations and personalities are formed on the fly: the same character can prove to be a decisive leader or a cowardly opportunist—this changes not only the dialogue but also the outcomes of important scenes.
Here’s a little hint: in a world where anyone could be a bloodthirsty alien, trusting each other is crucial. And trust must first be earned.
Scripted something
So far, so good, right? But Directive 8020 fails miserably at its most fundamental point. The story’s conceptual foundation is an alien capable of assuming the appearance of any crew member. You don’t know who to trust! You try to discern a deadly enemy in every awkward word or unnecessary gesture. Total paranoia is simply begging to be felt.
In practice, however, such emotions are criminally lacking in the game. During the entire playthrough, doubt will overtake the player only a couple of times, strictly according to the plot. The rest of the time, the crew interacts quite amicably and without sidelong glances—as if the mimic alien doesn’t exist or is currently on a pizza break.
This lazy decision by the developers is easy to understand: it was much easier to control the narrative and make a game that way. But when a work’s central idea fails, it’s cause to question whether it was a success. The creators should have shown creative courage. It’s clear that in this genre, making the antagonist’s appearance spontaneous is practically impossible, but they should have at least created a clever illusion.
In the second half of the game, the paranoia—effectively absent—gives way to far less subtle tactics. You know, those huge, meaty, aggressive monsters that only understand pain. It looks okay, but it’s too familiar and completely fails to surprise. Moreover, the genre shifts abruptly, and here the game finally devolves into a run-of-the-mill action horror.
The gameplay here is completely secondary.
Usually, we talk about gameplay first, and then about everything else. But this is different, because we’re dealing with an interactive film. Yes, in Directive 8020, the developers have tried to expand the traditional formula. The game is no longer limited to strictly linear cinematic scenes—there’s relative freedom of movement. You can explore the ship’s compartments, collect notes, activate terminals, and interact with the environment to search for clues.
This gives the title an even closer resemblance to narrative RPGs, which the studio has been cautiously moving toward for a long time. There are far fewer quick-time events than before, but stealth has been added. Predictably, it’s conventional: a couple of rooms with a patrolling enemy—blind, deaf, and dumb. The mechanics, to put it mildly, are not revolutionary. The only good thing is that the developers have a sense of proportion: such episodes are few and far between, and they are hardly annoying. But they also don’t provide much of a sense of risk or suspense.
The traditional “Movie Night” mode is also here. Up to five players gather around a single screen, pick apart characters, and grab the gamepad whenever they’re active. This is perhaps the most engaging way to play Directive 8020: while the game might seem a bit bland solo, it’s sure to be quite exciting with a group. Just remember to threaten your friend with betrayal whenever the opportunity arises.
It’s a matter of technique
Graphically, the game looks decent. No glare, but also no eye strain. The only thing that breaks the visual harmony is the character animations—in cutscenes, they move like in a movie, but in gameplay, they look more like puppets with a movable head and a wooden body. That’s just not the way it used to be.
The environment artists also didn’t show much imagination: in the first half of the game, the graphics seem completely unnecessary—there’s not much to show on screen. The situation improves later: when the ship begins to transform under the influence of the alien, the visuals become noticeably richer.
Technical performance on consoles is stable: quality (30 fps) and performance (60 fps) modes are available. DualSense adaptive feedback adds tactility where appropriate. We didn’t encounter any serious technical issues.
Result
Directive 8020 isn’t a bad game, but it’s definitely mediocre. It’s definitely stumbled over its own ambitions: the central idea doesn’t work as intended, and instead of an atmosphere of mutual mistrust, it’s a rather predictable interactive movie. Had the creators taken a risk, things might have turned out differently, but it’s a safe project as is.
However, the game isn’t without its good moments. Space horror is a rare guest on the big screen, so dive right in if you enjoy this niche setting. You’re unlikely to regret the time spent—Directive 8020 is quick and never gets boring.
- transparent elections and consequences
- replayability
- a reason to get together with a group
- the topic of facial expressions is not covered
- the heroes don’t evoke much emotion
- the story is hardly surprising
