Directive 8020’s rewind feature makes play-your-own-survival-horror easier for completionists

Supermassive’s well-regarded interactive survival horror series, the Dark Pictures Anthology, is ready for its second season. Directive 8020 will be its first entry and was available to play in demo form at SGF 2025, even if it was heavily weighted with cutscenes and context-setting preamble.

The demo kicked off with a meeting between Young and Stafford, marking the anniversary of Young’s father's death, who was also a long-time friend of Stafford's – the commander of the space mission that Young is also bound for.

The plot then leaps four years forward, placing us aboard the spaceship Cassiopeia. Oh and it’s somehow overrun by some fungal, sentient alien goop. Worse still, but also a horror staple, the goop is coalescing into almost-perfect copies of the human crew. Trust no-one!

When the hydroponics bay is overrun by an alien substance, two crewmates Cernan and Stafford, have to fight their ET doppelgangers. Finally, I got to play (but only for a few minutes), moving stealthily around the lower deck of the hydroponics bay while my alien copy (now fungal and angry) tried to hunt me down. Fortunately, you’re equipped with a scanner to mark where the aliens were last seen, and after triggering a nearby hydroponic pod to distract, I made my way up the ladder.

This was one of three ways to play this section, handily introducing a new mechanic for The Dark Pictures’ second run: Turning Points. Using this feature, you can rewind to these decision trees, allowing you to replay sections and explore different options or alter the outcome. This is an interesting change for the series. In previous games, while you could rewind to replay entire sections in macro, there was no way to change a single micro decision.

I discussed this with my colleague Jessica Conditt, and we’re both the kind of players to continue with our terrible decisions in games like Directive 8020, the Dark Pictures Anthology, Until Dawn and the rest. Fortunately, then, Directive 8020 will include a hard-boiled Survivor Mode – with no rewinds.

The demo shifted back to a more narrative focus and cutscenes, briefly interrupted by the possibility that one crew member (specifically, the CEO funding the whole operation) might be an alien. Did I pull the trigger? Nope. I’ll have to wait til the October launch to know if that was the right decision to make.

Directive 8020 launches on 2nd October, 2025 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam.

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