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”...

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