Being dumb and behaving stupidly is a trademark of the horror genre. Especially in movies and having prime examples in the lush decades of 1980 and 1990s with their wave of slasher flicks starring teenage kids who are so hapless and without a clue in the world, sometimes so bafflingly so it made us wonder how they’d survive if breathing wasn’t an involuntary bodily function. It’s natural to doubt people’s decisions during high stress scenarios, and for the creatives in charge, it worked to keep audiences entertained over the years.
With games and having the player mostly in control, it doesn’t necessarily work the same way. Unless we aren’t having agency on what’s going on, whether it’s through scripted cutscenes, preconceived character progression/build, or simply the lack of option when it comes to what you can do in any said situation, it’s especially annoying having obviously bad decisions being made for you. It’s what made me positively livid with Supermassive Games’ Directive 8020, their first game in what is by all accounts a brand new season of their Dark Pictures series.
Set in space in the far-flung feature where humans have finally turned Earth into a dump and have to look elsewhere for a home, you play as a crew of astronauts aboard the Cassipeia, one of the two ships sent out to space to find a suitable replacement for humanity to move into and potentially ruin. As some of the first subjects to have gone so far from their home planet and having to wake up from a 4-year long deep sleep, it comes at a surprise that something has gone awry while you were counting your winks.
Under mysterious circumstances, a gaping hole formed in the hull of the ship, and initially unbeknownst to the crew, some kind of organism has made its way into it. Playing as a handful of its members, it’s up to you to do your best and survive, against the odds that are continuously going up against you. Plus, the terrible decisions that are made for you without your input, along with your own that are forced upon, make playing Directive 8020’s otherwise hands-on approach to gameplay something that it’s best played in quite the opposite manner, by simply not caring about what goes on throughout its 8 episodes.
While I’m used to the general approach taken by the developers after playing some of their previous releases like The Devil in Me and The Quarry, it’s astounding to see how the general IQ of characters has gone down in the past 4 years since last touching one of these. Even so far as having one of the most moronic leaders who simply refuses to acknowledge that anything’s wrong until it’s too late – the type of guy who is on his last mission and ready to retire, so what the hell, not a care in the world – along with companions that are equally stupid, so much so that it’s bound to ignite anyone’s sense of disbelief right away.
As with other Supermassive games, this one is played from a third-person perspective, with very limited interactive options. Exploring the ship and occasionally click on something, and later having to madly press a button during a QTE, while all too often being forced to sneak around in order to avoid a creature or a companion turned hostile. Thankfully, hitting a ‘game over’ is kind of the point of games like this, as a timeline is formed creating crossroads whenever key decisions are made, or consequences occur, and you’re naturally incentivised to skip back and forth within it in order to recreate situations and turn the tide whenever you feel like.
Knowing that kind of softens the blow of the otherwise annoying writing that permeates throughout Directive 8020. Yeah, things that happen are dumb, you will most certainly fail a lot, but having a way of reverting back at will works in trying to capture your interest in the game, or at least your curiosity as to how things might have gone if X was done instead of Y, or if it’s more worth going back and seeing if Z really was the only alternative in that one scenario. It’s something that the studio has been doing for a better part of a decade up to this point, and serves as the one saving grace for this newest release.
Along the same path taken in their previous works, lots of attention has been put in portraying its characters realistically at least when visuals are concerned. Borrowing the voice and looks of actual actors such as Day of the Jackal’s Lashana Lynch, who plays co-pilot Brianna Young, Directive 8020 has that same uncanny valley feel which paired with the sometimes spotty animation and stiffness in controls help set the uneasy mood of the game even more solidly. It’s not to say it looks bad, but the overall feel here is of discomfort, not just the one you feel while consuming a piece of an entertainment product focused on horror, mind you.
Then again, there are bounds of people who are likely not to care about these issues as they’re used to not caring about logic in their games, and to them I have the greatest of admiration. To me, though, witnessing the attempt at producing humans that try their best to look the part while at the same time going against any sense of self-preservation is positively distracting. While this makes a tiny part of my mind want to see them all go the way of the dodo because of that, the rest of me that’s in control much better prefers looking elsewhere, even back to Supermassive’s catalog, for the next anxiety-inducing kick than Directive 8020, sad to say.
