'Directive 8020' is 'The Thing' in space, but is developer Supermassive Games biting off more than it can chew?

Supermassive Games feels like a predictable and reliable studio at this point. Ever since Until Dawn, they have mostly focused on releasing solid, and sometimes excellent, narrative-driven survival horror titles. However, over the course of the 10 years since Until Dawn’s release, the team has subtly tried to flex its muscles by evolving what little gameplay its games have.

That trend continues with Directive 2080, one of the studio’s next horror games, where it feels like the studio is being bolder than ever and trying to ensure Directive 8020 is a game and not just a movie you watch.

But, after interviewing the game’s Creative Director, Will Doyle, and spending some time with the game at Gamescom 2025, it still feels like Directive 8020 needs a lot of time to cook. While overall visual quality, facial animations, and acting are better than ever, the actual gameplay additions here need a significant amount of work because, at the moment, they're a chore that drags down the experience. In fact, we struggled to see why they're here and what they contribute to the terror experience aboard the Cassiopeia.

It’s everywhere

Set in the distant future, Earth is dying and humanity is running out of time. Tau Ceti f is humanity's only hope to find another planet to sustain life, so the colony ship Cassiopeia is sent out, but it crashes on the planet upon arrival, where the surviving crew quickly realise they are not alone. The crew is being hunted by an organism that can inhabit anyone nearby and mimic its prey.

Speaking about the genesis of the project, Doyle said Supermassive was heavily inspired by The Thing. “We had the fans saying to us way back since Man of Medan, ‘oh make The Thing’, make The Thing’. So, it fit really, really well.”

That inspiration manifests itself in more than just crafted cutscenes and a movie-like structure, with Directive 8020 adding real-time stealth and persistent threats. This is the furthest Supermassive Games has strayed from the cinematic and orchestrated vision that defined the last 10 years of the studio. The intention behind adding this, according to Will Doyle, is to enhance the fear. “I think there's nothing more scary than when you're holding the controller, something’s hunting and you know it's down to you to move when the time is right, and it's not quite so choreographed”.

At the end of the demo, which takes place before the main events of the game, one of the characters, Simms, becomes inhabited by this creature aboard the ship and starts hunting Carter, the character we were playing at the time.

Carter has to hide behind pieces of waist-high cover and move around Simms, who patrols the corridors of the ship, to try and make it to his destination. While a big surprise to see, we can’t say the stealth felt enjoyable. It had a lot of hallmarks of a studio’s first attempt at something new. Granted, it is their first attempt, but we can't help but wonder if Supermassive is biting off more than it can chew, given that this is going to be a core mechanic throughout the game.

As is par for the course with Supermassive games, the camera was wonky and slow, especially when trying to track Simms’ position and look in a different direction to see where to hide next. This languid camera is a problem throughout the demo, but it was especially frustrating here. There was no detection meter or visual cue to indicate that Simms had seen you, or was becoming aware of your presence; instead, she just barked the same lines back and forth, and we had to estimate whether we had been seen or not.

The enemy AI wasn't great either. After the initial stealth section, we walked forward only to have Simms randomly appear in front of me. We panicked, thinking we had been spotted, but she just didn’t see us crouching out in the open in front of her and carried along her designated patrol route. On top of this, the game’s plodding pace, laborious puzzles, and sluggish character movement left us at the edge of our wits, rather than our seats.

It just took me out of the whole experience, which is something Supermassive’s games rarely do. Directive 8020 still has a decent amount of development time left, but after several rounds of layoffs, we wonder if the studio has the manpower and time left to polish and enhance this stealth experience.

The core idea of the enemy — a monster that can be anywhere or anyone — sounds great, but the demo just wasn't enjoyable to play. Maybe things improve as you progress deeper into the game, but we're not hankering for more after our brief time skulking around the Cassiopeia.

Absolute cinema

Directive 8020 is definitely opting for a more cinematic, big-budget movie feel than ever before. The demo opened with a camera flythrough of the ship, set to a chill pop song, as you watched Simms and Carter carry out small tasks or sit around in their rooms as everything on the ship is normal, for now. It felt ripped right out of the opening of any TV show or movie.

There were other small moments throughout the demo that evoked this feeling too, whether it was camera angles, shots, or the excellent facial animations that really help Directive 8020 feel like a cutting-edge game from a technical standpoint. The graphical fidelity is impressive, and the animations are superb, especially on the characters' faces. We didn't see any of the weird teeth, eye, or lip movements that popped up in previous Supermassive titles.

Continuing that cinematic styling, there was even an awesome Alan Wake II-style music drop at the end of the prologue chapter. You can really feel the strong narrative direction here, and the overall concepts of the story, the characters, and the work put into the game’s cutscenes feel like it is poised to be the highlight of the experience, especially when Brianna Young (Lashanna Lynch) wakes up from cryosleep after the events of this opening chapter.

More flexibility than ever

While we didn’t really get to see it in action, Directive 8020 is also offering up more flexibility and choice for players than ever. The game’s Turning Point system effectively serves as a library of the game’s key story moments, and you can return and revisit any of them at any point and play from that point onwards, even in previous chapters. So, if there is a decision you aren’t too keen on, or you don’t like the results of a key story choice, you can give it another try.

There are also individual personality traits for the five characters you control during the main story, and the relationships between them are clearly displayed in the game’s menu. The choices you make for these characters can, in Will Doyle’s own words, “nudge them towards one of two destinies. At some point in the story, you'll reach the culmination of their destiny”.

While vague in this demo, this is a gameplay system tied to the choices you make in the game, and it seems to act like ‘endstates’ for each character’s personality. This could be they live or die, or it could be something else, but it was hard to gauge exactly the effect this would have across the whole game.

There is even a hard difficulty mode that ups the game’s challenge and the intensity of its quick-time events or persistent threats, although we weren’t able to test this out during the demo.

Upon leaving Directive 8020’s demo at Gamescom, we were left with mixed feelings. While the game’s production values and cinematic direction really help elevate it beyond anything Supermassive Games has done before, we can’t help but wonder if that would have been better served with a tighter gameplay experience that enhanced what the studio was already good at, rather than trying to nail new mechanics and systems that are uncharted territory for it.

It’s such a tricky game to gauge during a 40-minute demo, and while it didn’t give the best first impression, we are cautiously optimistic that Supermassive can nail the game’s feel and polish up some of its rougher edges in time for the launch in 2026.

Directive 8020 is due to release in 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows PC.