The Next Dark Pictures Game Directive Gives Players What Theyve Long Awaited

The Dark Pictures Anthology is up to its fifth horror story in the ongoing series. Supermassive creative director Will Doyle told me The Dark Pictures will go on "as long as people keep buying them," adding that the team has a list of nearly 40 horror subgenres it's interested in tackling in the future. But the next one, Directive 8020, is set on a spaceship, and though I expected it to play like Alien or Event Horizon, it's actually much closer to The Thing.

"Since we made [2015's] Until Dawn, we've had people saying to us, 'Make The Thing, make The Thing!' It fits our mechanics really well. We have multiple characters that you control. We have multiplayer components, you're playing different characters. And we have choices. So that kind of 'Who do you trust?' element just fits the mechanics of the games we make."

Doyle's right; it's a great fit. In the game's multiplayer mode, each player is assigned a character or multiple characters. These characters thus become your wards, in a sense. And it's always tough when you lose your character, yet your friends are able to press on with theirs. Typically, every one of these playable characters can live or die, so there's long been a fun social element baked into The Dark Pictures: Who can get their people out still breathing?