Directive 8020 Drifts Away from Dark Pictures Season 2 Label for “A Fresh Start”

For years, developer Supermassive Games annually released new games in The Dark Pictures Anthology beginning with Man of Medan. In 2024, however, that trend was broken with Supermassive releasing The Casting of Frank Stone, a game in the same genre but published by Behaviour Interactive and set within the Dead by Daylight universe instead. The Dark Pictures games return this year with Directive 8020 out in October, but this one feels different from the others.

Directive 8020 changes the tone immediately by sending players into space. Futuristic spacecraft components, stun batons, and body horror transformations straight out of The Thing populated my hands-on demo with Directive 8020 at Summer Game Fest, all of which felt very atypical compared to the more grounded games that make up the rest of the series. Prior to where the demo started, Dan McDonald, executive producer at Supermassive Games, said we’ll even get some out-of-the-ship segments.

“When you start the prologue, the first episode of the game, we have some sleeping technicians,” he said. “Most of the crew are asleep, and they have to be awakened to tend to the ship. A meteor hits the ship, they have to investigate. It being horror, some bad stuff’s gonna happen to them.”

Zooming out from the pacing and setting, everything about Directive 8020 from the name to the creators signals a turning point. While the other games in the series were published by Bandai Namco, Directive 8020 is published by Supermassive itself. It also dropped “The Dark Pictures Anthology” as a prefix before the title and instead just goes by “Directive 8020” with “A Dark Pictures game” sometimes added depending on where you look. Directive 8020 is supposed to kick off Season 2 of the series as well, which always seemed odd considering the games weren’t really aligned with a seasonal structure anyway, but McDonald confirmed in our interview that Supermassive is moving Directive 8020 away from that label even if it technically still is a Season 2 game.

“We don’t talk about Season 2 as much anymore because now, we’re focused really on Directive 8020 as its own thing,” he said at Summer Game Fest.

Emphasizing some features like a renewed focus on stealth and what he called “threatening exploration,” McDonald continued by suggesting these changes signal a natural shift. Aside from these sorts of upgrades, lessening the focus on Season 2 helps avoid confusion for new players.

“It is part of the series,” he said for those who might mistakenly think Directive 8020 is separate like The Quarry or The Casting of Frank Stone. “We are continuing the series beyond this, and there are still the links that we do between the stories and the different nods to it, but it’s really trying to take away any confusion from people. You don’t need to play Season 1. I want you to play Man of Medan and Little Hope and House of Ashes and The Devil in Me because I love those games, but you don’t need to play them. It’s just trying to take away that confusion and make sure people understand that this is its own thing.”

Unfortunately for longtime Dark Pictures players, that also means The Curator who narrates Dark Pictures stories won’t play as big a role in Directive 8020. Going back to the more grounded nature of the other games, McDonald said The Curator’s office with all its leather and books and maps didn’t mesh as well with Directive 8020’s setting.

“He’s still there. He’s just in the background a bit more for the moment,” McDonald said. “We’ve got a lot of plans for him for the rest of the series and for this game as well. It’s just not as obvious at the moment. It’s a bit more hidden.”

When asked why Directive 8020 was the right moment for this tonal shift, McDonald said it’s not about disparaging the other games and is more about “learning and growing and trying different things.” Directive 8020 is longer and bigger, and one of its flashiest new features is called (ironically enough) “Turning Points” which accommodates players who like to backtrack or see every outcome. All of those changes set Directive 8020 up as a clear pivot point.

“With the Turning Points, we expect people to get into those different sequences and see a lot more of the content,” he said. “It feels like a fresh start. We don’t want to throw anything away, but it feels like a fresh start.”