With Supermassive Games having just released its latest entry in the Dark Pictures Anthology—Directive 8020—creative director Will Doyle was kind enough to answer some of our questions, ranging from the jump to sci-fi, to technical performance on consoles, and even how the studio managed to bring in replayability into its narrative-heavy horror title.
Supermassive has worked across horror for years, but Directive 8020 feels like a bigger shift into sci-fi survival horror. How much did that genre change the team’s storytelling and design processes?
The Dark Pictures were always intended to develop new gameplay with each new entry in the series. With Directive 8020, we took a little bit longer than usual to iterate on our gameplay mechanics and raise the quality bar for the ongoing series. As part of this, we wanted to broaden our audience by including more “on the sticks” gameplay while preserving the narrative, branching drama that we’re so well known for. The game has a very interesting pace – you have these spikes of “lean forward” action where your survival is dependent on your own controls, with dips of “lean back” interactive drama where you can catch a breath. It’s important for us that we keep our games as accessible as possible, so gamers can always tailor their experience to their liking using difficulty settings. If you find that the “lean forward” sections are too hard, it’s even possible to make your character invulnerable for those moments.
"The Dark Pictures were always intended to develop new gameplay with each new entry in the series."
The sci-fi setting opens up different kinds of fear than your previous games. What unique opportunities did space, isolation, and the mimic-style alien threat create for horror?
Each Dark Picture game explores a different subgenre of horror, but this is the first time we’ve delved into sci-fi horror. Our story draws on many beloved sci-fi sources, but perhaps most of all, we were inspired by John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” We wanted to create a shape-shifting alien which could pose as a human and infiltrate your ship’s crew, causing you to question who among them you could really trust.
I think space is truly terrifying as you’re effectively locked in a tin can, surrounded by death! Everything beyond the walls of your bubble is hostile to human life. This makes it a perfect setting for a horror story.
Setting the game in space gives us so many opportunities to create feelings of dread (and wonder!). While it’s so vast, it is also intimate, as you’re cooped up together in a vessel. Claustrophobia and isolation are key feelings too.
Scifi was interesting for us, as in the past, we’ve often centred our stories around teen horror. For this one, we wanted to tell a story about scientists using their heads to solve their problems. It’s a very different tone.
As the fifth Dark Pictures game, how standalone is Directive 8020 for newcomers, and what connective tissue still matters for longtime fans of the anthology?
Directive 8020 is a stand-alone title in that you don’t need to have played our previous games to enjoy it, but it’s set in the same shared world as our other titles and is very much a Dark Pictures game. There are plenty of Easter Eggs and connective tissue in the game that reinforce this. I can’t say much more without spoiling!
For Directive 8020, we have settled on the tagline “A Dark Pictures Game”, which tells our fans that it is part of the shared universe, without suggesting that it is an essential follow-on to other games in the series.
We had feedback that many newcomers thought that they had to play through our games sequentially – partially due to terms like “Season.” So, we wanted to ensure that our messaging is clear for our audiences.
"There are plenty of Easter Eggs and connective tissue in the game that reinforce this."
Turning Points is one of the game’s biggest new ideas. What problem were you trying to solve with that feature, and how did you make sure it adds flexibility without undercutting tension?
Our main goal with Turning Points was to show players how much branching there is in the game and let them easily jump back to decision points to make the experience of exploring the story as graceful as possible. In essence, it is a visual map of the story that shows your path through the story – by selecting turning points, you can “rewind” your story to redo your choices. We know people often give our games multiple playthroughs to find out all the different branches. So, it’s just really showing players that there’s an easier way to access these different points.
Choices are really important in our games – the magic of our game structure is that the story keeps rolling even if characters die when you make the wrong decision. But we also know that some players will stop playing when their beloved character dies. With rewinds, we’re giving them the opportunity to explore the story freely.
Many of our players love that classic “no second chances” style: if they want to play the original way, where every choice is irreversible, we have a Survivor mode playstyle mode that lets them see the decision tree but turns off rewinds.
Survivor Mode seems aimed at players who want the classic no-safety-net Dark Pictures experience. How important was it to preserve that old-school pressure alongside Turning Points?
It’s really important to us that players can play Directive 8020 how they like. We want to be respectful of their time. Some players will really appreciate the ability to rewind or explore different branches in the story – and they will really like Turning Points. Our testing with the system has really surprised us with how popular it is, even on first playthroughs.
However, we also know that many players will want the classic experience. This decision pressure is something that resonates with many of our players. Survivor mode is for them, and we expect this will be a popular mode too, especially on first playthrough.
"It’s really important to us that players can play Directive 8020 how they like."
Directive 8020 appears to push more into real-time danger, stealth, and direct threat management than earlier anthology entries. How far were you willing to evolve the formula without losing the studio’s core identity?
The key reason is we wanted to keep upping the fear. There’s nothing scarier than when you are being hunted by a creature in real time. However, a lot of hide-and-seek games can feel pretty relentless – for us, we wanted to sprinkle these moments through the game to create a unique tempo. They’re intentionally quite simple. It’s really not a hardcore stealth game.
Directive 8020 is more hands-on than our previous titles, but it still features impossible dilemmas, intense cinematic drama, secrets, and everything else you love from our previous Dark Pictures games.
Movie Night returns with up to five-player couch co-op, and online multiplayer is planned as a free update after launch. How did you approach the social side of horror this time around?
Couch co-op is our classic “Movie Night” experience, where up to five players take turns controlling the cast and play the game together to survive the story. In couch co-op, you only need one controller, which is passed around the room as different turns come into play. This has always been our most popular multiplayer mode, so we wanted to bring it online for the first time and allow players to get together with friends wherever they are. This online mode is looking really good but we just need a little longer to finish it.
So, Directive 8020 will launch with offline couch co-op play, with the online version following as a free update soon after. One of the cool things that online couch co-op play supports is multiple users on the same connection – for example, you could have two people playing on one machine, connected to three people playing on another. We call this “bringing living rooms together” and we expect it to be quite popular!
"Directive 8020 is more hands-on than our previous titles"
Were there any lessons from The Quarry or earlier Dark Pictures titles that directly shaped how you approached pacing, character control, or replayability here?
We are always learning and improving the art of telling branching narrative stories. Each story has a different narrative shape, and each learns in some ways from those that came before. We’ve experimented with extremely branching stories – Man of Medan is an example of this – and we’ve tried more focused stories like Little Hope. It’s important that each story is shaped differently to avoid predictability.
In Directive 8020, the end of the story has one of the most unpredictable setups we’ve ever made. For the final episode, practically any combination of characters is possible – it’s even possible to have just one survivor for the entire episode. It’s also possible to end the story half-way through the game in a calamitous event we call the “death spiral.”
For pacing, we were mindful that a good game story needs regular spikes of action. In Directive 8020, this was one of the reasons for us including “flash forward” scenes to up the tempo in the earlier stages of the story.
Replayability was the reason for including Turning Points. We trialled a similar system in the Casting of Frank Stone, but Directive 8020 has really honed it into something special.
The “trust no one” premise seems central to the story. How do you build paranoia into both the writing and the player’s decision-making without making outcomes feel random?
It was important to make the mimics in our story very good imitators – we didn’t want them to speak or act in a distinct way that would make them too easy to identity. There are certain “tells” that the player can pick up on (which I’m not going to spoil here!) but on the whole, they are good at their job!
The shape-shifting aspect of our creatures is a really fun part of the story, but it’s not the whole story – the organism goes through various stages across the game, with some forms much more monstrous. We really leaned into body horror for some of these moments!
"There are certain “tells” that the player can pick up on (which I’m not going to spoil here!) but on the whole, they are good at their job!"
What were the biggest creative influences behind the setting and story? Were you looking more to classic sci-fi horror, modern survival horror, or something else entirely?
John Carpenter’s “The Thing” was probably the big inspiration, but the story also draws on movies like Aliens, Sunshine, Life – and books, including H.P. Lovecraft’s “Mountains of Madness.” Our games are very cinematic, so we’re always asking ourselves “how would this happen in a movie?”. It’s a good guiding light.
The PS5 Pro version has already been detailed publicly with PSSR, ray tracing, and other enhancements. How much do those visual gains matter specifically for horror, where mood and legibility are both so important?
It’s hugely important – lighting matters in horror much more than in other genres. Quality of visuals is also very important for creating a sense of believability. That suspension of disbelief is vital for creating meaningful fear.
Replayability has always mattered in your games, but Directive 8020 feels especially built around revisiting branches and outcomes. How many substantially different playthroughs do you think players can realistically get out of it?
We have a range of choices, some small, some large, that impact the outcome of your story throughout. Some of our outcomes are based on “compound choices” i.e. the sum of multiple choices. Each character, for example, has two different “destiny” moments that are unlocked through traits that can only be changed by conversations with other crew members. At the end of the game, we also have some fairly major ending outcomes. There is also a “hidden link” to one of our previous games that only unlocks if a certain character survives…