Directive 8020: Supermassive’s New Sci-Fi Horror Game Inspired by The Thing

by Fernando Diaz / Articles, Editorials, Upcoming Games / 25 Jun 2025

The designers of The Quarry are swapping slasher for sci-fi… and their new mimic enemy looks like the perfect recipe for singleplayer horror and multiplayer chaos!! There’s a certain kind of anxiety only a Supermassive game can provide! It’s that gnawing feeling deep in your gut when a dialogue timer’s counting down and you know your ham-fisted response will have your beloved camp counselor butchered — graphically. It’s the cold sweat when you’re hiding under a bed, controller held perfectly still, praying the QTE prompt doesn’t pop up!! For years with Until Dawn & The Quarry; they’ve made us masters of our own horror movie demise…

and now… apply that equation — the do-or-die choices, the multiple narratives, the Hollywood acting — and set it 12 light-years out into the hard unforgiving emptiness of space. That’s Directive 8020 and it looks like Supermassive is going to take our distrust issues to a cosmic level!!

Classic Sci-Fi Hopelessness

The setup?? Good old-fashioned sci-fi hopelessness. Earth is dying and humanity’s best hope is a colony ship — the Cassiopeia — to a potential new home on Tau Ceti f. Genre convention dictates this will all go horribly wrong… the ship crash-lands, the crew is stranded and they soon realize — they’re very, very not alone… but the real horror isn’t some giant xenomorph or shrieking necromorph. The horror of Directive 8020 is the most devilishly effective kind of paranoia intoxicant — the imitator.

The alien terrorizing the Cassiopeia crew is a mimic; capable of copying its victims perfectly. Drink that in… this is an impeccable homage to John Carpenter’s The Thing; repurposed for the high-fidelity choose-your-own-adventure age of horror. It’s the social fear of Among Us amplified by hyper-realistic visuals and the kind of high-impact cinematic storytelling Supermassive is so good at. The person you’ve collaborated with for years, whose life you’d bet your own on, could be a monster in waiting. Every conversation becomes a loyalty test. Every decision to help another could be you signing your own doom!! The developer isn’t asking “Can you survive?” anymore but “Can you survive when you can’t even trust anyone??”

Branching Storytelling and Moral Dilemmas

To make this branching hell worth it, Supermassive is introducing a new Turning Points story tree. They call it a way of “rewriting your destiny” and saving fellow crew members from “doomed deaths.” For anyone who’s ever tossed a controller in anger after a beloved character died because of some mis-timed button smashing — this is a welcome evolution of their Butterfly Effect system. And then — Supermassive brings the hammer down. The final confrontation isn’t just about surviving the creature in the vents. The setup gives us a gut-wrenching ethical quandary — to save themselves, the crew must risk the lives of every human being on Earth!!

That, right there — is the good stuff… it’s a wickedly delicious option that ups the ante from survival to species-level retribution!.!. What’s the use in getting out if you sentence the place you can never return to?? It’s the kind of no-win, can’t-win scenario that defines the best sci-fi horror.

Looking Ahead to 2025

We’ve got a bit of a wait & speculation ahead until its 2025 release date… But the DNA is all there. Supermassive is taking its tried-and-true formula and feeding it one of the most successful horror genres around. They’re not just releasing another horror game — they’re constructing another pressure vessel for our nerves — but this time set in the least hospitable environment imaginable!!

I for one am more than willing to have my heart broken once more when my favorite character — played by the wonderful Lashana Lynch — necessarily turns into a goo monster because I chose the wrong piece of dialogue… and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Fernando Diaz

Fernando is doing what he always did, sharing his honest opinions about games whenever he can. The difference is now he is writing and not talking about it.
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