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I’ll always be up for a game that riffs on John Carpenter’s The Thing, and the last few years have been especially strong for representation of hostile, amorphous alien life forms in games. We’ve had The Thing set on an oil rig, The Thing where you play as the Thing, and just plain old The Thing, albeit shinier and easier to play. Now, Supermassive Games is giving us The Thing in space, with its latest Dark Pictures Game, Directive 8020, arriving this October.
Now, you might argue we’ve already had The Thing in space, in the form of the Dead Space trilogy. But Dead Space was only inspired by the Thing at an aesthetic level, with similarly horrible shapeshifting monsters that go “GRABOWALAGAGARGH!” when they attack you. As its new trailer demonstrates, Directive 8020 more specifically adopts The Thing’s themes of paranoia and mistrust.
Set on the good ship Cassiopeia, Directive 8020 sees a crew of astronauts embarked upon a “deadly mission to save humanity”. But the spacecraft is struck by an object containing a biological organism that can perfectly mimic its prey, which begins replacing the crew. The trailer doesn’t give much else away about the story, but the general atmosphere, along with lines like “Do you think Williams knows more about this substance than he’s letting on?” provides a pretty good overview of how things are likely to go down.
The trailer doesn’t provide much insight into how Directive 8020 will play. Like all of Supermassive’s games, it appears to be a highly cinematic affair. That said, the Steam page mentions “real-time alien threats” that you’ll have to overcome using “improvised weapons, lightning reflexes and stealth”, which makes it sound more mechanically involved than previous games. Indeed, in an interview with the Radio Times from last year, creative director Will Doyle said the studio is pushing “much more towards survival horror, action-adventure,” though without “losing what we are.” Could Directive 8020 be the Dead Space successor that the Callisto Protocol was meant to be, therefore?
It all points to something of a reboot for the Dark Pictures series. The first three games in the anthology were decent enough horror yarns, but none of them quite captured players’ imaginations in the way Until Dawn did. The studio suffered a heavy round of layoffs early last year, and seems to have reconvened around a more substantial Dark Pictures title, while it also works on Little Nightmares 3. In any case, we’ll find out exactly how Supermassive’s spin on the Thing shapes up when it launches on October 2.
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Kurt Indovina
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