Man, I certainly missed the anthology of dark pictures. After four contributions released four years in a row, it is now three years since the end of the season and since then I have been dying for another film night massacre. Now the series is finally back with the 8020 Directive: The Thing Thing version in space. It drops that dark pictures of antological branding, but get some exciting new features.
Related
Dark Pictures Anthology: Every game, rated
Which game will survive? Which one not? The choice is ours.
Last weekend I had to play a decent piece of upcoming horror to survive film survival at Summer Game Fest, where I was happy to find that the studio had used these three years off to give a series of complete man. Between the transition to Unreal Engine 5, an increased focus on action gaming and a new point of turnover, the Directive 8020 feels as if the game that this team builds in a variety of Dark Pictures.
In space no one can hear you kill and steal their body
It's about the damned SuperMassive time, finally dealt with aliens. We had ghosts and killers seals and occult and even crazy vampires, but we never got to experience paranoia, isolation and helplessness of horror set in space. The 8020 Directive goes fully science fiction and as we expected from all the SuperMassive genre raids, its vibrations are immaculate.
The 8020 Directive, as well as other Dark Pictures titles, gets heavily leaning on the classic. His story of the spacecraft under the surrounding of an unknown extraterrestrial threat is rooted in the cosmic horror of an alien, the horizon of events, things and invasion of body snippets. Its assumption is known: in finding a new planet that replaces the dying Earth, the crew of Cassopeia Crashland on the extraterrestrial planet. Soon they are an amorphic threat that can imitate the crew by turning them into them. How can you trust someone if it could be a monster in disguise? It's a classic trop for some reason and I'm excited to see SuperMassive to take it.
With a limited time, I was thrown directly into the chaos. The crew members are dead, one is closed under the suspicion that he is an alien, and two crews are attacked by their own clones. Things are happening quickly and it does not take long before one crew member points the weapon for another, and now I have to decide to press the trigger.
The swivel points give you more control over your own story
In the other games Dark Pictures would decide to shoot this person or not, then you would find out if it was really a monster or not, and whatever the result, the plot would move forward. Whatever it happens, and it will not return – at least not until the next playback.
You can still play 8020 Directive. I will probably do it because I like my own canonical version of the story that is personal, mistakes and all of me. But with a new point of turnover, you have the freedom to change your options whenever you want. You can rewind, repeat and try again. It is a tool that gives you unprecedented control of the story if it's something you want.
The presentation of the rotary points is really great. The story timeline is set in a long chain, which has expanded each decision point and created a huge network of causes and effects. You can explore the timeline to get a better idea of how your choices have influenced the story (something that was sometimes quite opaque in previous titles), but you can also travel back to any previous turnover point and change your decision. From there you will have to continue the story to find out what changes – you can't just jump back to a place where you should have revived characters – but it's a great way to see more story without having to play the whole game.
Take more stimuli from the horror of survival
Four Dark Pictures slowly added more and more characters to each game, which allows you not only to decide on the characters, but also to explore scenes with them. The 8020 Directive takes this even further with sequences that would be indistinguishable from modern horror games such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
I played a secret sequence where the character falls into the bay under the ship and is persecuted by a frightening, xenomorphic alien. When Monster patrols take control of the character to secretly go from one end of the room to the other. When the alien turns back, you have to timing your movements, hide when they approach, and throw the items that you pick up from the ground to distract them. In this scene, the 8020 Directive is transformed into a third -party survival game, the only difference is that if the monster catches you, you not only reload your last saving to try again.
That's a huge difference. I often complained about how horror games would lose all your tension when a monster catches you and you simply restart it to the last checkpoint. There is no fear of persecution when you know it doesn't matter if it catches you. In the 8020 Directive, however Yes mass.
Maybe you won't die right away. I let the creation catch me just before I got to the east, which triggered the cutscene of my character to be knocked and beaten. He manages to break free, but now he has injuries that will undoubtedly reappear and change the course of his story, potentially even helps to determine whether he lives or dies.
If you hate it, the rotation system allows you to return and try again as any other game. But if you are brave enough to just let things play, however they can, these game sequences will add a whole new layer of consequences to the story. It is not just a choice of A or B; Catching a monster near the east could have a completely different result than they would immediately catch. How it catches it might change you, what injuries you suffer. It is a more complicated network of turnover than ever before and it is all documented for you in a nice, easy -to -understand developer diagram.
It was a long waiting for the beginning of the second season, but so far it looks like it will be worth it. Thanks to the new engine, the characters and the environment look more realistic than ever and the next time the SuperMassive has been able to improve the formula into its strongest version. They had me on things, but after I saw all the big changes, I feel like it would be the best entry into the series so far.
