When Until Dawn was released in 2015, it felt novel. Telltale had popularized a specific formula of interactive narrative, but Supermassive’s teen-slasher horror game took its ideas and applied an impressive layer of creativity and production value on top of it alongside casting choices that only look more brilliant with time. Successive entries in the The Dark Pictures Anthology series, however, have increasingly failed to live up to the promise of Until Dawn, and Directive 8020 is the latest result of that downward trend.
Directive 8020 looks great. Close-up shots of character faces show an incredible level of detail, and the overall art direction stands above the severe shortcomings of the narrative. The attractive, if uninspired, general design of the spaceship Cassiopeia and its computer systems feel like they’re from the future, and the monstrous alien menaces you must contend with are impressively grotesque. The visuals of this peek into a potential science-fiction future are Directive 8020’s strongest element. But much like the mission the Cassiopeia crew is on, it all falls apart once you start.
The stakes are high in Directive 8020 with a small crew of astronauts scouting a potentially habitable planet as Earth’s long-term viability wanes. A strong licensed soundtrack backgrounds an enticing opening as the only conscious members of the crew kill time until the rest can be woken from hypersleep. Once the astronauts start talking, characterizations and mysteries are established with the subtlety of a giant flashing red arrow, and I began to immediately question the credentials of every crew member chosen for this historic mission.
In the horror genre, playing armchair expert while scared people make stupid decisions is part of the fun. But that joy gets sucked out of the airlock when the story has painstakingly and repeatedly established that the cast is the smartest of the smartest, hand-picked and trained to be humanity’s last hope for a mission that literally could not be more important. Instead of revelling in the outcomes of their poor decisions, stupid mistakes become frustrating and feel preventable, which they aren’t even when you’re trying valiantly to push everyone toward the right calls.
The larger story beats are all achingly cliched. The references to science-fiction horror like Alien and The Thing are so transparent that they feel like rip-offs that don’t understand the source material as opposed to fun homage. I absolutely don’t mind taking a dip in the warm bath of genre storytelling, but Directive 8020 struggles to establish its own identity while citing its sources. I also just generally felt like I was being talked down to as its “mysteries” were being unfurled. I shouldn’t always be three steps ahead of, as is repeatedly established, the smartest people on planet Earth – supposedly the only ones capable of completing this mission.
But even in the individual moments, Directive 8020 struggles. A fire in one area of the ship that forces a decision between saving the lives of two crew members results in the unfortunate victim sitting down amidst the flames and calling it a day, as they basically make no attempt to reach a nearby door. In times like this, you can immediately rewind a story moment to try a different outcome, which raises the question: What are we even doing here? If I can change every element of the story as I am making my way through it, then why does any wrong decision or missed quicktime event matter? I like seeing the story permutations eventually, but if the choices in the moment don’t matter, then my feelings about the characters and the story don’t matter either.
Gameplay, which is admittedly not Directive 8020’s focus, mainly involves avoiding the eyeline of bad guys in the dark. Moving the characters is functional, but waiting for backs to be turned so you can sneak by is not particularly thrilling or scary. The door-unlocking minigame is enjoyable, and I liked being able to text other characters between cutscenes for additional conversations, but it did little to endear me to anyone in the forgettable cast.
I took more notes while playing Directive 8020 than I normally do while reviewing a game, and they’re almost all character complaints or story frustrations. The primary purpose of this experience is to engage and draw me into a narrative filled with characters whose fates I am invested in. Instead, I was too busy questioning decisions (theirs, not mine), rolling my eyes, and grappling with an overwhelming feeling of déjà vu to ever lock in.