Directive 8020 Will Be Cinematic Survival-Horror At Its Finest - Gamescom 2024

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There’s something about cinematic games that always gets me. I love how it feels like a movie, but I am able to both interact with it and dictate the path the story takes. There are plenty of awesome games like this, like Until Dawn and Detroit: Become Human, but if I ever wanted a true horror spin to the formula, the Dark Pictures Anthology was the way to go. At Gamescom, I got to see a sneak peek of the next game in the series, and it takes a pretty bold new direction with survival-horror mechanics implemented. And after the presentation, my worries about the direction just washed away.

Directive 8020 is a departure from the series in many ways, and the setting is probably the most apparent on the surface. All of the other games in the series took place in modern-ish times on Earth, while the new game goes into the future with you on a spaceship. You play as Brianna Young, who is portrayed by the incredible Lashana Lynch, trying to direct her crew and help all of them survive after crash landing on a planet while looking for a new home for humanity. The game takes place on the ship trying to survive aliens that can morph into people, so you’ll have to use wits and cunning while making hard decisions to try to ensure their survival.

Personally, I love the new setting. I am biased since I love sci-fi and futuristic settings, but I respect that the developers wanted to try something new and go a different route. The details in the environments are still there, too, with everything looking dark, mysterious, and so grotesque. The lighting, in particular, is great, keeping things darker and more mysterious but still able to navigate. The ship and character models themselves look especially disgusting, but the intended effect of horrifying me definitely worked. The way the characters can look disfigured when the alien is using their appearance is even more appalling than I could have imagined.

But that’s not all that’s changed, as this entry has more interactivity.

Instead of just walking around or moving the right stick to make your characters act, we now have some modern survival-horror mechanics into the fold. Visually, the normalized Resident Evil third-person camera angle has been adopted. We also have new mechanics to the series that come from those survival games, like being able to crouch down, hide, and use stealth to navigate around enemies and even use items to push them back. One of the items you can use is a sensor to better track where the alien is, which can come in handy when sneaking around since the aliens can see you quite easily.

It sounds like the series is going more into survival-horror territory with Directive 8020. However, the team showed that the defining features of the Dark Pictures Anthology series are still alive and well! Characters can die permanently, the actions you take have a ripple effect across the rest of the game, and there are different endings you can get. Even with the change in mechanics and setting, the core aspects of the series are still there, and I'm so happy their identity didn't seem to get erased with the new direction they are taking.

In a way, the game looks like a sci-fi Resident Evil 4 with a heavier emphasis on cinematics, story-telling, and player choice to direct the way the story goes. I have 0 complaints. Directive 8020 looks exactly like what I would want from a game described as such, and I can't wait for the release! Playing on the Steam Deck may not be possible, considering the GPU requirement is an RTX 2070 Super with 16GB RAM, but never say never!

Directive 8020 can be wishlisted on Steam now ahead of its 2025 release.

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