DIRECTIVE 8020
By: Supermassive Games
For: XBOX, PS5, PC
Rating: ★★+
I am a big fan of story-driven games, but I admittedly don’t have a lot of experience with the interactive “choose your own adventure” type. The closest I’ve come to recently was Dispatch and before that was the last review I did for a Supermassive game, The Quarry, which I remember enjoying. But, sadly, throughout Directive 8020, their latest, I couldn’t help but feel a profound difference.
Directive 8020 is an interactive fiction game and the fifth entry in “The Dark Pictures”, Supermassive Games’ horror anthology series. Most of the gameplay is watching a cutscene play out and making choices, many of which have rippling consequences throughout the game. In between cutscenes, there are small stealth and walking sections where you either evade enemies looking to end one of your character’s lives, or where you can do some light exploration as you move from point A to B.
Most of the gameplay is selecting dialogue options, interspersed with Quick Time Events (QTEs) when something stressful or precise starts happening. When not in a QTE or a cutscene, you are probably in a walking section or one of the tenser stealth sections.
The stealth sections are, while well-intentioned, poorly done. Things feels rather simple. Enemies move on pre-set paths, just kind of back and forward and stopping to give you the opportunity to move. It’s bare basics. The most interesting it gets is closing doors to block off paths or using sound to lure enemies, but those instances are few and far between. It’s usually just hide until they turn around and then start moving. Another issue for me was the actual risk of capture or lack thereof. Getting spotted isn’t even a massive issue if they don’t touch you — just duck out of sight and wait until the enemy starts their path again. There were several times I was sure I would be caught only to crouch and hide and just have the enemy freeze for a minute and simply forget I was there.
The game features a large branching path map which tracks the story into sections called “Turning Points”, allowing you to jump around the narrative and rewind bad decisions. All the options you can make are also shown; you can also see what requirements are needed to unlock those options, as they can go back several chapters to decisions you made near the beginning of the game. Choices may also change a character’s “Destiny”, a mechanic which keeps track of how you reacted to certain things for each character and what relationships they have, and some turning points are automatically decided based on the character’s destiny.
The setting is honestly a classic. A spaceship, an alien species with an unknown motive, corporate undertones? It’s just Alien but damn it, it’s fun and effective. Unfortunately, the story isn’t as good as the setting demands. It felt formulaic and not in a “tried and tested” way, but more of a “come on, you have to realise you’re in a horror movie” type of way.
Some of the story beats feel a tad forced; there were moments where it felt like the characters should definitely know certain things by now, but instead they bumbled around while I just rolled my eyes. Some decisions that led to character deaths also felt a bit unfair and a little out of character, and the big reveal kind of made me shrug.
While the acting of some of the main cast is great — the actors for Young (Lashana Lynch, the big name here), Cooper, and Eisele come to mind as standouts — some of the work from and on the supporting cast and other playable characters left a lot to be desired; especially noticeable were some strange animation issues. Mouths not bothering to move while someone was talking happened far more than I thought acceptable.
Performance was smooth for the most part, but with occasional hitches. This was mainly during cutscenes, but also happened during one of the stealth sections which was disappointing and almost got me killed.
Interactive fiction or visual novels trade pure kinetic gameplay for an amazing story. They offer the opportunity focus purely on the narrative to bring a story experience worth the price of admission alone. But I don’t think Directive 8020 hits the mark on that. The story doesn’t land, most of the characters don’t feel like I should care about them and instead of leaning into the story, the game tries to innovate and adds half-baked stealth sections. The ending and story didn’t leave me feeling like going back and looking through all the paths, and I finished my permadeath play-through with a shrug. If you enjoy Supermassive and their other catalogue of games then yeah, this is probably for you, but this isn’t one if you want a good example of what this genre can do.
