As the curtain opens on Directive 8020 – Supermassive Games’ new sci-fi horror romp – a couple of things are immediately clear. Space is scary, and the thought of a mysterious something or someone being out there with you is even worse than simply being on your own.
Aboard the colony ship Casseopeia, it doesn’t take long for things to start getting really creepy, really fast. We’re introduced to a couple of crewmates investigating an issue on the spacecraft. Spoiler alert, something fleshy and alive has made its way on board – an alien threat that can mimic its prey – and as one of our two friends suddenly becomes suspiciously aggressive, we have our first run-in with the foe.
Dead silence
Key info
Developer: In-house
Publisher: Supermassive Games
Platform(s): PC, XSX, PS5
Release date: TBC 2026
If you’ve played any of Supermassive’s Dark Pictures Anthology games, or even the likes of The Quarry or Until Dawn, you’ll know that your survival has previously hinged largely on your decisions in key moments, as well as the occasional quick-time event.
In Directive 8020, however, on top of all that, we’re introduced to real-time threats, which pull you away from that on-rails narrative more than ever before to give you full control when it comes to avoiding and running away from your alien foe.
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In my preview, I’m thrown into a stealth section where I’m forced to sneak around my hostile, imposter ‘crewmate’ and get to safety. This offers a different kind of terror; while making a simple choice can be horrifying when you’re not really sure of the consequences, having yourself fully in control of an outcome with permanent consequences is something else. I put up a good fight, but at one crucial point, my guard slips. This leaves my character irretrievably dead, with no QTE or safety net to give him a second chance.
“There’s a very classic Supermassive kind of scare, which is very cinematic,” creative director Will Doyle tells me in an interview. “Our games mix cinematic moments with kind of discovery gameplay or exploration gameplay. I think the real-time threats are very scary… Cinematic ones are brilliant, we can choreograph those to scare you in a way we want to scare you, but once you’ve seen them, they’re not so scary.”
On the other hand, real-time threats “move around,” and ultimately create something that “gets your heart beating faster” as you play. “I find that very scary,” Doyle adds.
It should be noted that the real-time threats don’t have to be deadly – Doyle tells me that regardless of the difficulty setting you’re playing on, you can tweak your settings so that “it’s almost like a ghost train – they’re there, and they’ll chase you, but if they catch you, it’s very easy to escape.”