Summary

• Directive 8020 takes The Dark Pictures series into space, offering survival horror with real-time threats and creepy alien encounters.
• Players must navigate a ship infested with an alien species that can mimic crew members, leading to tension-filled choices and jump scares.
• The game features innovative tools, puzzles, and a new level of intensity, promising a cinematic, immersive experience for horror fans.

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Directive 8020 is one small entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology and one giant leap for how Sup♎ermassive Games delivers its unique brand of standalone horror stories. At Gamescom, I caught up with creative director Will Doyle as he showcased a demo of Directive 8020.

As teased at the end of The Devil in Me, Directive 8020 is taking the series far into the future for the very first time. The crew of the Cassiopeia travel 12 light years away to the planet Tau Ceti f in the hopes it will prove to be a liveable𒆙 alternative for the doomed population left on the dying Earth. Unfortunately for astronaut Young, portrayed by Captain Marvel’s Lashana Lynch, and the rest of the crew, they find themselve𓆏s far from alone. Fortunately for us horror fans, they’re stuck with a killer alien that can mimic its prey.

Doyle tells me it was “incredibly liberating to be able to make a space game, to let our production design🙈ers and artists go wild”. While the setting might seem pure speculative sci-fi, much like the previous entries in The Dark Pictures Anthology, there is still a historical basis to be found.

“We always like all of our games to have some basis in real-world truth, whether it's an actual fact or a piece of folklore,” he says. “This game does have some connections to the real world. Directive 8020 itself was a NASA directive that said that if NASA astronauts found extraterrestrial life out in space, they had to quarantine before coming back down to Earth, so the name itself keys into that. There's also some connection to some of the Apollo programs. One of the earlier ones was short-fueled so they couldn't land on the planet. We’ve still got a load of connections, there's a load of hidden stuff in the game that does point to the real world.”

Doyle tells me that there’s as much science as fiction, as the team had 📖to “make sure that it feels grounded and real”. Of course, they also delved into researching aliens themselves, which leads us to discuss the possibility of alien life. I confess to my deep-rooted fear of aliens thanks to my older brothers telling me they lurked at the bottom of rivers, waiting to attack, while Doyle tells me his mother is convinced she once saw a UFO.

“I think there's something really interesting about if we were to find alien species,” Doyle muses. “What would they want? What's their motivation? And sadly, if we were to look at history and science, probably not that good.”

Doyle says Directive 8020 is essentially The Thing set in deep space, which is where The Thing comes from. The team is leaning into cosmic and body horror in this title, presenting a disgusting warꦰped fleshy creature with a polymorphous form, so it can appear exactly as another cr🎃ew member to infiltrate your team or present itself as its hulking hunter form for brute force.

But these aren’t mindless aliens just hunting prey for sustenance. “When they do mimic a human form, it can infiltrate the crew so it can talk. It's a very intelligent species but it thinks in a different kind of unknowable way.”

During the demo, I’m shown one of the possible scenes players might encounter based on their decisions. Mitchell, a crewmate quarantined in his quarters for his own safety, has escaped and you later find him sobbing. As you approach, he turns around and you realise from the face pustules that this is not Mitchell, but one of the aliens. Though this example showed us an imperfect mimic, we’re told the alien can achieve a perfect form and infiltrate the crew, leaving you uns🧜ure about who to trust as you progress through Directive 8020.

The alien lifeform can also present as a strange bulbous, fleshy growth that covers the inside of the ship, sometimes shutting down areas or opening new avenues of exploration. Itcan merge into this gro🌊wth to travel around it, popping up in unexpected💦 places to pose even more of a threat.

Directive 8020 features everything The Dark Pictures fans love from before, with branching player decisions, cinematic scenes, and the possibility that any character can live 🌱or die. It also builds on the tool systems and more puzzle-like elements The Devil in Me💞 introduced, and seems to have perfected these ideas for a more intuitive and enjoyable experience.

The tools𒈔 have evolved since The Devil in Me, with Directive 8020 giving players a utility strap that offers a variety of features. A remote control can allow you to interact with screens to distract the alien so you can sneak past, the scanner can detect and locate the alien (though it can still appear randomly through the growth), the messenger keeps you in co🅷ntact with your crewmates, and the wedge tool has the double purpose of overriding doors to gain access, or giving a blast of electricity to the alien to defend yourself. Last but not least, your torch will light the way ahead - but the alien can see the beam of light, so you’ll need to be careful using this.

“There are a lot of puzzles,” Doyle says. “The Devil in Me features tools, but the tools end up being very specific to certain locations. The ones that we showed you in the software today are available all the way through the game. At any time you can scan your surroundings, you might see wiring in the walls, you're able to go over to that and rewire different systems, and open up different areas. Your remote control can see through a window to a door lock that you can't get to normally, you can open that up. There are puzzles and wards all the way through the game, and at certain points, there are more bespoke puzzles, which are closer to some of the ones we have in The Devil in Me, but really it's a higher frequency all the way through the game.”

Unlik🐻e The Devil in Me, you won’t lose any of your tools, however, Doyle tells me that as the utility strap draws power from the ship, which has crashed and scrambled the power systems, there will be situations where you can’t use everything at your disposal.

“There are times when [power] cuts out, so we have a lot of fun with that. You've got your scanner where you can tell where the creature is, of course at times, we pull that function away from you because the system's broken down. The messenger can break down at different times, so you can't properly communicate with people, you're getting scrambled messages, so it's a load of fun stuff that we're doing.”

Though Directive 8020 is not a sandbox game, Doyle tells me there are “little sandbox sections” and wider areas to search for tools and hidden bits, si𒀰milar to The Devil in Me. However, the team wanted to ensure they maintained a familiar cinemat♉ic pace that The Dark Pictures is known for.

However, Directive 8020 isn’t just another The Dark Pictures game. It’s forging a completely new path forward for the series that leans more into survival horror and promises more agency than ever before. Players face real-time threats, a completely new concept for the series, while completely redesigned character movement allows for stealth as you try to avoid the killer alien lurking in the claustrophobic wreck of the Cassio🌌peia, such as over the shoulder camera movement and full camera control with immediate, responsive controls.

“I think this on-the-sticks gameplay is really going to blow people away,” Doyle tells me. “It's scary. That's why we did it. When you've got the controller in your hand and there's something out there that's going to chase you down, you play it in a different way. In some of our previous games, most of the death occurs during cinematics, so weirdly, when you weren't in control of your character, sometimes it felt a bit safer. But that's now complicated. I think our fans will see that, and I think they'll like it.”

The new focus on real-time survival horror might seem alienating (or The Thingating) to long-term fans who love the series but don’t excel at more demanding survival horror gameplay. However, Supermassive Games’ team is ensuring that anyone can tackle Directive 8020 wi🃏th a range of accessibility and difficulty options.

“We're looking into developing a safe mode, so that the creature can't actually get you, which is similar to games like Soma,” Doyle tells me. “It's worth saying that the way it's set up isn't massively intense, difficult gameplay. It's terrifying in the moment, but it's actually quite a substantial experience. There are things I can't talk about as well that we're looking at, which will make your chances of survival a bit easier.”

As someone particularly susceptible to jumpscares, I ask Doyle just how much I’m going to be leaping out of my chair when playing Directive 8020. “You're going to jump a lot,” he laughs. “That's one of the things we established really early on in the game, this threat mechanic, it’s real-time enemies. From that point on you don't know when they're going to come.” As well as the real-time scares, Doyle confirms there are still plenty of scripted jumpscares in the cinematic moments too.

However, he couldn’t confirm or deny whether we’d see some of the staple mechanics and features return. Notably, I asked him whether we’ll see the Curator retur🦋n. “As you know, the Curator is a mysterious character, and we have to be mysterious about him at the moment. There’s more to come, so watch this space for the Curator.”

This mysterious tone comes and goes through our discussion. “We definitely have loads of secrets,” Doyle says. “It's still got that feeling of the main story, and then you're also discovering little bits of narrative that build up a deeper story around it. We have what we internally call our ‘super secrets’. You know, there are secrets and there's another level of them which are bigger.”

He couldn’t even say whether we’d see The Dark Pictures themselves return, though it seems like a safe bet considering the series is named after them. Each game in the series contains one Dark Picture that shows a clip of the next game in the series, as well as references to other games in the series, and while Doyle avoided a firm 🥂answer, he promised there would be parts where we find things and ask, ‘Oh what’s that?’ and that the ꦅgame is “full of easter eggs”.

When I ask Doyle whether this more sci-fi setting is indicative of where season two of The Dark Pictures is headed, he’s just as mysterious. “Each of our games is mainly based around a sub-genre, so we picked sci-fi horror for this one. That's the grounding of this game. Whatever game we do next with The Dark Pictures will be grounded to some sort of horror. Whatever horror fits best, it will be that. We're also really enjoying building a universe that is our world, but darker and creepier. Bit by bit we're building a new sort of genre.”

For a climactic finish 🎐to the demo, Doyle asks whether our preview group﷽ wants to see Young live or die in the final section. Naturally, we all cheered them on to show us the gruesome death scene, and so Young makes the misstep of going the wrong way and has her head crushed inwards by the hulking hunter form of the alien. Gory stuff.

A new focus on survival horror and creepy aliens, with the classic staples of gruesome deaths and lots of secrets. What more could we want from Supermassive Games’ next entry in The Dark Pictures series? We’ll find ♛out what else it’s hiding next year, with Directive 8020 currently set for a 2025 launch.