DIRECTIVE 8020

This sci-fi horror with rewind mechanic still left me sweating

- Erik Van Allen

Supermassive Games has made a name for itself with narrative horror games such as Until Dawn and The Quarry that are driven by player choices, but aspire to look like the movies. With Directive 8020, though, Supermassive is thinking about the breadth of its scares and is finding ways to iterate on how it does horror.

The story of Directive 8020 is centered on a team of astronauts, undertaking a mission to Tau Ceti f, a last hope for a dying human race, 12 light years from home. The crew of the colony ship Cassiopeia depart with optimism, but soon find themselves embroiled in something much more dangerous than they could have imagined: a flowchart. OK, no, the flowchart—key to Directive 8020’s new approach to branching storylines—is actually helpful. The dangerous part is a strange, alien substance aboard the ship, something fungal and biological, that’s able to change shape and even mimic members of the crew.

After playing a short narrative flashback setting up the journey, my hands-on demo with