MeinMMO editor Caro has already spent the first hours on board the Cassiopeia, humanity’s last hope, in the new sci-fi horror “Directive 8020” for the PS5 and Steam. As a horror enthusiast, she looked forward to particularly creepy moments but found her true horror in something much worse: the weight of her decisions.
When I had the opportunity to look at Directive 8020 in advance, I was cautiously optimistic. While I’m not a huge sci-fi fan, I love the horror genre, and particularly body horror is one of my favorites. My favorite games include Scorn and the recent Resident Evil titles. After the first glance at the teaser and trailer for Directive 8020, I was quite excited about what to expect.
“Directive 8020” is the 5th title in “The Dark Pictures” anthology of interactive, cinematic survival horror games, where your own decisions and the resulting consequences play an important role. However, the creators of Until Dawn and The Quarry do not send players to a mountain cabin or summer camp, but into space. More precisely, on board the Cassiopeia, which is to explore humanity’s last hope, 12 light-years from Earth: the planet Tau Ceti.
The crew’s mission is to confirm the habitability of the planet from orbit and thereby initiate the subsequent terraforming and settlement by humanity. However, we wouldn’t have a sci-fi horror game if that went so smoothly, would we?
Because after a small leak in the ship, much of the planning goes awry, which, however, is the least of the crew’s worries. They are no longer the only life form on board. An alien matter that can imitate and alter bodies causes a lot of paranoia and light and heavy decisions, which stressed me out far more than any jumpscare.
Here you can see the trailer for Directive 8020:
Body horror is all well and good, but this annoying responsibility …
The game does not reinvent the wheel compared to previous titles like Until Dawn. You will find a guided but still interactive gaming experience, where your decision, no matter how big or small it may initially seem, has significant consequences. You are aware of this right from the start, which completely overwhelmed me during my first decision.
It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but after a tremor in the ship, I became paranoid after my first decision to check the onboard computer first. What sounds logical at first immediately raises other alarm bells: this will take longer, we will miss the true danger, something alien will be roaming around before we can stop it – I have surely damned us to death.
Right after my first decision, I had such a bad feeling that I had to reload like a coward to change my decision. So we immediately made our way to the place of the tremor… even though it sounds really like the dumber idea in hindsight. UP TO NOW I still haven’t figured out what the smarter decision was in the end.
Thanks to the turning points within the timeline with possible paths, it’s an embedded feature that I as an insecure wreck was really grateful for. This timeline also allows you to find out in future playthroughs which paths you haven’t chosen yet to uncover as many different endings and secrets as possible.
Given my uncertainty, you can imagine how I sweated in actual stressful situations to make the right choice. Especially when this really decides the life or death of a crew member.
My true horror in Directive 8020 was therefore having to live with the consequences of my own decisions, and my goal: not to become the annoying character of a horror movie, whose decisions make the audience only roll their eyes.
“The Thing” in space
Speaking of horror: already in the first episode of the episodic story of Directive 8020, you get a hint that something really bad has landed on board that you shouldn’t ignore: a living and quite fleshy matter that not only feeds on the walls of the ship but apparently also penetrates the psyche of your own colleagues.
When the two specialists for monitoring hypersleep come across the source of the tremor and find a hole with suspicious secretions, they are just too relaxed for my taste.
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