Supermassive Games' new sci-fi horror game Directive 8020 doesn't just let you redo your worst mistakes, it also speaks to my completionist heart

As the curtain opens on Directive 8020 – Supermassive Games' new sci-fi horror romp – a couple of things are immediately clear. Space is scary, and the thought of a mysterious something or someone being out there with you is even worse than simply being on your own.

Aboard the colony ship Casseopeia, it doesn't take long for things to start getting really creepy, really fast. We're introduced to a couple of crewmates investigating an issue on the spacecraft. Spoiler alert, something fleshy and alive has made its way on board – an alien threat that can mimic its prey – and as one of our two friends suddenly becomes suspiciously aggressive, we have our first run-in with the foe.

Dead silence

If you've played any of Supermassive's Dark Pictures Anthology games, or even the likes of The Quarry or Until Dawn, you'll know that your survival has previously hinged largely on your decisions in key moments, as well as the occasional quick-time event.

In Directive 8020, however, on top of all that, we're introduced to real-time threats, which pull you away from that on-rails narrative more than ever before to give you full control when it comes to avoiding and running away from your alien foe.

In my preview, I'm thrown into a stealth section where I'm forced to sneak around my hostile, imposter 'crewmate' and get to safety. This offers a different kind of terror; while making a simple choice can be horrifying when you're not really sure of the consequences, having yourself fully in control of an outcome with permanent consequences is something else. I put up a good fight, but at one crucial point, my guard slips. This leaves my character irretrievably dead, with no QTE or safety net to give him a second chance.

"There's a very classic Supermassive kind of scare, which is very cinematic," creative director Will Doyle tells me in an interview. "Our games mix cinematic moments with kind of discovery gameplay or exploration gameplay. I think the real-time threats are very scary… Cinematic ones are brilliant, we can choreograph those to scare you in a way we want to scare you, but once you've seen them, they're not so scary."

On the other hand, real-time threats "move around," and ultimately create something that "gets your heart beating faster" as you play. "I find that very scary," Doyle adds.

It should be noted that the real-time threats don't have to be deadly – Doyle tells me that regardless of the difficulty setting you're playing on, you can tweak your settings so that "it's almost like a ghost train – they're there, and they'll chase you, but if they catch you, it's very easy to escape."

Beyond that, even your classic decision-making moments don't have to have irreversible, permanent consequences, depending on what difficulty you're playing on. While playing on the hardest difficulty does ensure that you're locked into all of the ramifications that come your way, the others give you full access to the Turning Points and rewind system. In the background of your Directive 8020 experience is a huge, branching timeline showing events that you've seen, and blank spaces for the bits you've not.

A new nightmare

Much like the Timeline in Quantic Dream's Detroit: Become Human, Directive 8020's Turning Points feature allows you to jump back in time and approach situations differently. That means if you're not happy with an outcome you got originally, there's nothing stopping you from going back to see what happens if you go in the opposite direction.

For completionists, this should also streamline the amount of backtracking you'd have to do to witness all these events, allowing you to fill out the timeline a bit like a sticker book without having to play the whole game over and over again. Satisfying!

"Our game is always about terrible decisions you have where nothing seems right or wrong," Doyle tells me. "We have this kind of design ethos where we're always saying, like, after you make a big decision, you should always be left with a sense of loss – whichever one you choose, like 'I've done something wrong here.' And so it's interesting with our new Turning Points system giving you the chance to rewind and redo stuff."

Doyle notes that the devs have found that some fans have previously found themselves "quite turned off" from Supermassive's games after being locked into the consequences of certain decisions, "and they disconnect from it." It's because of this that "we find it useful to give you the chance to rewind," but it's still possible to "play the game and live or die by every single choice" if you prefer.

During my preview, I decided to stick to my guns and live with the consequences of my actions, even if I did end up getting a character killed, but I imagine it'll be difficult to resist the completionist temptation to see all of the possible scenarios when the game releases next year. The urge to fill out those blank spaces in the timeline is just too strong, even if I'm admittedly nervous to find out what horrible events lie ahead.

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