At this year’s Summer Game Fest, CGM finally got hands-on with Supermassive’s next chapter in The Dark Pictures Anthology, Directive 8020, and after spending time with it, this might be the game where the series truly comes into its own after a stumble with The Devil In Me.
First teased at the end of The Devil In Me way back in 2022, Directive 8020 has quietly brewed for three years, and that extra time in the oven feels like it’s paying off. Simply put: this is the most polished, ambitious, and genuinely unsettling entry in the anthology so far. Whether it can keep that momentum when the full game drops on October 2, 2025, remains to be seen, but so far, the signs are promising.
The section we played focused on two sides of Directive 8020’s The Dark Pictures coin. First was a stealth-heavy segment that surprised me in the best way. The tension of creeping through a derelict ship, trying to avoid a shape-shifting alien mimic, felt tight and focused, like Supermassive Games finally figured out how to make actual gameplay as compelling as their signature cutscene choices. There was weight in every step, in every decision to move or hold your position until the hulking mass moved on. It was the most “game-feeling” moment I’ve ever experienced in a The Dark Pictures title, and I mean that as praise.
The second part brought back the familiar decision-driven drama that makes or breaks these games. This time, we faced a brutally tense moment: trying to decide whether the ship’s captain was losing his grip on reality… or if he was already the mimic. His violent outbursts, his paranoia, the way the crew eyed him, every clue felt loaded.
“Directive 8020 might deliver not just a story worth playing, but a game worth playing.”
What made it more exciting was the dev’s assurance that this moment can swing differently in each playthrough; sometimes the captain’s just a paranoid man cracking under pressure, other times he really is the monster in disguise. It’s the kind of branching uncertainty that Dark Pictures has always aimed for, but this time, it felt sharper, more deliberate. Like they might actually pull off making every choice matter.
If there’s one takeaway from the Directive 8020 demo, it’s that Supermassive seems to finally be stitching its ambitious narrative ambitions to gameplay that actually feels fun to control. The atmosphere oozed dread, the tension felt earned, and the stakes in our choices were the sharpest they’ve ever been in the series.
Sitting down with Dan McDonald after going hands-on really showed that the team is excited to keep continuing their journey and refining it along the way. Directive 8020 might deliver not just a story worth playing, but a game worth playing. October 2nd can’t come soon enough.
How has it felt for the team coming back to the Dark Pictures Anthology?
Executive Producer, Dan McDonald: We’ve been working on this since before The Devil and Me launched. When we started with Man and Madan, we knew what the first four games were going to be. We actually had a good idea of what the next four were going to be as well. Some of that has changed over time as we’ve learned more. We knew about some of the core concepts, so we’ve been working on it for quite a long time. But it’s nice to finally be able to show it off.
It really feels like you’ve been refining the gameplay experience over the course of the series, and it seems like Directive 8020 is the big one, this is it. There are more player-controlled gameplay elements, and it seems to be a culmination of everything so far.
Dan McDonald: After every game has come out, we do a lot of user testing. We take all the reviews that come out and collate them together and try to understand what people like and what they didn’t like. We take our own feedback about that stuff as well to try and make the next game and the one after it better. There’s only so much you can do when you’re doing a game every year.
“We’ve been working on this since before The Devil and Me launched.”
Dan McDonald: We’ve kept doing that for every game. This helps us add the different mechanics we’ve put in there, for Little Hope, one of the big changes we found through feedback was adding in the full 3D camera. It was a big change for us. We had a lot more exploration mechanics.
Each game in the Dark Pictures Anthology has been a different sub-genre of horror, and like you said the team’s kind of had it mapped out. Is that order of sub-genre of horror in any particular order?
Dan McDonald: It was what made sense to do next, more than anything, and we have changed it since we originally mapped it out. We each have our own preference for different types of horror. My favorite horror movies are actually things like The Conjuring, The Thing, and Event Horizon, which we use as inspiration.
You get the sense almost immediately that there’s a really big focus on body horror, blood, and gore. More so than the rest of the series, this looks like it’s shaping up to be the most vicious and violent entry. Was that a conscious decision?
Dan McDonald: Yeah, a hundred percent. It’s like our version of The Thing in space. You know, it’s not just that—it’s a lot more than that. It’s more than just the unusual, gross bones and deformation; it’s also the wet, gross sounds that back them up. It also plays into the fear of the unknown with the shape-shifting.
Early on in Dark Pictures, there was a moment in Man of Medan where you’re like fighting your multiplayer person without knowing it’s another player. Obviously, this could really take that idea to the next level. Any chance we could see something like that in Directive 8020? We haven’t really seen how multiplayer is going to work here yet.
Dan McDonald: So the multiplayer has changed for this game. This time around, we have the movie night mode, where it was five players on a couch previously. But now, it can be five people online across whatever machines and any combination of couch or online. That was important to us in this kind of story and how we wanted to tell it. It could be a few people together and some online, or any combination of online and together, it will work.
The big new mechanic in Directive 8020, I noticed while playing through, was the rewind mechanic. Being a player who plays these games multiple times, this is great!
Dan McDonald: So we’ve been thinking about this for a long time. We know that some of our fans and players play the games through a bunch of times. It’s always been quite hard to do that because in the past, we’ve made you play through big sections of the game again. It’s just about enabling players to play it how they wanna play. We still have options, and we have difficulty setting that we’ve had for a long time now, which can make it your classic Dark Pictures Anthology experience.
Directive 8020 has been in development for longer than the other titles, and I mean you can feel the time when playing it. It feels like the best playing one so far. Is this the kind of cadence we can expect going forward with the Dark Picture Anthology games?
Dan McDonald: I think it’s always about what’s right for each game. We did have an ambition when we first started. We actually wanted to do one every six months, and we started on the path of doing that. But, during the development of Man of Medan, we realized that it was a bit crazy.
So Little Hope needs to take longer because it would give us more time to focus on it, and make it a better experience overall. That is pretty much how every game has been: we focus and make the next one better. We hope that long-time Dark Pictures fans and newcomers will see how much care went into not only the gameplay, but also the story of Directive 8020.
