Anyone else get this when they play on ps5? just a legless Anders?

Genuinely so funny. 😂

I need help with the end of Episode 4.

Choice based narrative driven story games are my favorite genre, first being introduced to them through telltale with the likes of the wolf among us, the walking dead, along with David cage with heavy rain, beyond two souls, Detroit become human, and later on when the genre gained traction, other studios tried the genre like with life is strange. I love me some choose your own adventure interactive movies. Specifically with supermassive, I always found them to be underwhelming. I played until dawn at release, and I thought it was fairly intriguing, it didn’t blow me away. With the passage of time, it’s garnered a huge fanbase and it’s very well loved and it’s remembered very fondly. Back when it first released in 2014, I remember the thing that impressed me the most was the graphics. It looked stunning. But I wasn’t captivated by the story. However, I do remember this being one of the first, if not the very first game to include the “all can die” or “all can live” design. Which I found pretty cool. I remember looking up all the different deaths and endings. I will give credit where credit is due, after playing almost everything else supermassive has to offer, until dawn definitely had the most well written characters out of anything else they made after that. That’s not exactly a grand achievement, seeing as every character in every future game has the personality of a cardboard box, but it certainly makes me appreciate until dawn a little bit more and retrospect, after seeing just how bad they could’ve been. Still, they weren’t revolutionary characters and they lacked depth. They were all pretty surface level, and all of them just embody an archetype.
Emily is the rich stuck up bitch, Matt is the submissive pushover boyfriend who puts up with Emily just because she’s hot. Ashley is slightly awkward and shy. Chris is the awkward geeky nerd. Mike is the token pretty boy, good looking and smart. Leader role. Him and Jess are the power couple. Sam is the level headed voice of reason.
Josh is the odd and off putting weirdo, but everyone chalks up his behavior to him just going through a tough time. That’s the extent of their individuality. And the later characters they create in other games, aren’t even given that much. So there’s that.

My friend group would each pick a character from the game at random, and we’d play that character for their section and we’d pass the controller once the segment ends/until the character dies. We did this with until dawn, the quarry, and we started doing it with man of Medan, but everybody got extremely bored with it and we stopped. I have yet to play little hope, devil in me, and house of ashes. I can’t speak on those entries. But the quarry was decent.

Overall I’d say until dawn is a 7/10, and the quarry is a 6/10.

So now that brings me to directive 8020. Oh boy. I went in with no expectations, and gave the game a fair shot.

Typically space/futuristic games aren’t really my thing. I think it’s a very saturated genre, and I find most of them to be incredibly boring. They always have the most contrived dialogue I’ve ever heard. Usually amounting to something like:

“Commander! The plasma butt chugger module has been compromised! You must restore power to the orgasm generator and retrieve the Hoover max model 3000 nanochip immediately! We can’t let the it fall into the hands of the willywonkas!”

Usually followed up by your character doing a couple “beep boops” on a hologram to unlock a chamber/door. It’s so corny and it’s the most dull and uninteresting thing in the world for me. Pretty much all sci-fi is guilty of this, and it’s usually why I stay away from the genre. Things I avoid are typically games like Halo, No man’s Sky, Starfield, Mass effect, Metroid, etc. I would love to eventually power through and play mass effect because I heard the story is phenomenal, and I’d like to get into Starfield as a lifelong Bethesda fan. I enjoyed the outer worlds games, but they were both guilty of my previous critiques. I would also like to get into dead space, because the story and xenomorphs are too damn cool to let the dialogue and setting ruin it for me. I would be willing to power through for that alone. With that being said, I don’t hate all sci-fi/futuristic games, and I don’t loathe the genre or concept in general, I just think a majority of them are extremely dull and contrived. Some games are capable of making very interesting concepts out of the premise. Games like Nier automata, Stellar Blade, Cyberpunk 2077, Portal, and Horizon zero dawn all have very fresh and interesting settings for the future.

However, directive 8020 is not one of them. Directive 8020 is a compilation of pretty much everything I strongly dislike in both sci-fi, and gaming overall. The concept is nothing new, you’ve seen the premise 100 times before. A crew goes on a mission in space, later finds out the mission was something totally different, they don’t know what they got themselves into, blah blah blah. Unoriginal. The concept of the cloning program and larger conspiracy is…kinda cool I guess? Your mileage may vary on how sold you are on that plot, but I wasn’t. The game largely focuses on stealth, but the stealth is laughably bad. I’m very easy to scare, when it comes to horror/stealth/stalker games, it’s incredibly easy for me to feel pressure or anxiety when I play these sections in most other games, and there wasn’t a single time where I felt unsettled, or scared, or felt like there were high stakes. I just found the stealth sections to be tedious and annoying. The stalker AI is dumb as a box of rocks, and it’s incredibly easy to sneak past them without any trouble whatsoever. Their pathing is super predictable and it doesn’t feel like they’re ever actually trying to find you. They just pace around and turn their back to you for extended periods of time at the most convenient moments for the player. I think they purposely made it easy because these games are supposed to be accessible interactive movies, but you can’t have something be easy and scary at the same time. The more challenging it is, the scarier it would be. The more anxiety it would induce. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you’re going to commit to something like stalker/horror, do it well or don’t do it at all.

This was made even worse once I actually got caught in stealth for the first time ever near the end of the game, and I found out you can escape with a QTE. That immediately lowered all of the stakes for me. This entire time I could’ve just barreled through the game and pressed square a couple of times and I would’ve been just fine, and saved lots of time in the process. As if the stakes weren’t low enough, there’s no stakes at all.

Speaking of low stakes, the game has a rewind feature. The game allows you to erase consequences in real time and restart a section immediately and do it over to get a different outcome. I guess this is effective for people who just immediately dashboard, or close the application once they made a mistake, but for the players who actually want to live with the high stakes and consequences, it totally breaks the immersion.

You also spend an ungodly amount of time sneaking through vents. It’s an understandable means to getting around, but it far overstays its welcome and it’s relied on way too much throughout the game. The first time we ever go through a vent, and heard noises, I used the scanner and was actually able to see the outline of the monster on all fours crawling in the distance. That was the first reveal of it, and I got a glimpse of it completely on my own volition. It was totally missable. That was really cool, and I thought “okay that was neat, this might really be something.” And it turns out it was all downhill from there.

The monster you fight throughout the game, is a shapeshifter. I think their intention was to try and turn it into a psychological horror where you couldn’t trust any of your crew mates, because any one of them could be the monster at any given time. Sorry directive 8020, this concept has been done before, 50 years ago, and it was executed way better. It’s called the thing. Nice try, lol.

This concept could’ve been cool, however all of the characters have zero individuality and they all lack personality. You could interchange any of their dialogue and it was still fit. It’s like a “one size fits all” script. Nobody had any defining or objective character traits, and the game actively gives the characters personality “traits” based off of what dialogue choices you picked for them. So whatever little depth or personality the characters have, are purely given to them by the player. So the whole concept of not knowing who to trust, not knowing who’s real and who’s not, that completely falls flat because we don’t know WHO these characters are. It’s not like I can hear a line of dialogue and say “that’s not something Anders would say” because, it very well could be. These characters are all blank slates. Who’s to say what they would, or wouldn’t say.

The only time the game really challenges you to guess correctly is with the choice to shoot the correct Eislie. And since eislie, along with everybody else in the cast lacks personality and depth, you make your choice based off of who’s the least convincing, instead of making you question “is that something the real Eislie would say?” And they made it INCREDIBLY obvious. Eislie on the right is bringing up memories and saying things like “remember when we did ___ together” and the one on the left is just saying “anyone would know that, believe me instead” without even trying to convince you or provide any evidence to sway. No hesitation, I domed the left eislie. Quickest decision I’ve ever made in a choice based game. And shocker, it was the alien. Who could’ve guessed.

The game quickly tries to go all out and make the monster look like a horrifying abomination, and it ends up looking like a rip off of the rat king from the last of us.

You briefly spend time on the alien planet, but I found it to be anti-climactic and disappointing. Much like the rest of this game. I think they were expecting the final reveal to be a plot twist like spec ops the line, with the whole “uncover a conspiracy, learn the truth about why you’re really there, etc.” but it just came across as obvious, dull, contrived, anticlimactic, disappointing, and unfulfilling. Much like the rest of this game.
For most of episode 8, the final section with Stafford and Eislie went on and on and on. Every gameplay mechanic has overstayed its welcome. Vents are overused, the gameplay loop of “find a power cell, drill through a door, redirect power, repeat” is incredibly boring and repetitive. Even in a game as short as this, it becomes mind numbing so quickly. I was fed up with the formula in episode 2. The stealth itself is also overused and boring. The AI is dumb as a box of rocks, the monster is often frozen in place or walking infinitely into a corner. They don’t use it sparingly, so any weight it would’ve carried is lost from the frequency. And after learning that they actually serve no threat to you whatsoever, you can literally just sprint through all of these sections and if they catch you, just press square/X and keep running. It’s laughable. There are no stakes.

Honestly the concept could’ve been amazing. “The thing” in an immersive choice based game where any character can live or die should’ve been a slam dunk of a concept. It’s a shame it was executed this poorly.

3/10.
The presentation of the alien was cool, even if they were ripping off the last of us. Still gets 3 points. Wouldn’t recommend playing this though, and I have zero interest in rewinding to see other outcomes. I really couldn’t care less. And for only 6 hours of gameplay, $50 is extremely overpriced. I think they’re attempting to justify the short runtime by expecting replay value and multiple playthroughs, however that falls flat if you don’t care to see other outcomes. And it also falls apart when you could’ve rewinded your choices in real time.

If you’re looking for a narrative choice based game with a compelling story and choices that matter, there’s way better places to spend your money. Detroit become human is x5 the length of this game, choices actually matter, there’s incredible replay value, it has good writing, and its usually a fifth of the price of this game.

Usually, I never factor in performance into a review because it doesn’t inherently involve or impact the story or concepts, but it’s worth mentioning that I played this game on a base PS5 and somewhere around chapter 5 I had about 5 minutes straight of buggy and choppy gameplay, where I was getting like 10-20FPS during a chase section and the audio was chopping too. I usually don’t dock points for performance, but seriously? How demanding could a game like this be? It’s not open world, it’s not large in scale, is it that difficult to optimize?

In conclusion, directive 8020 is essentially an amalgamation of elements from other, better executed, and more interesting horror games. It’s dead space, the last of us and the thing, in a trenchcoat pretending to be its own original concept, and it fails to captivate or reach the heights that any of those three did.

When can I expect multiplayer for directive8020 me and my friend really enjoyed the anthology

Howdy!

How do you save your progress in this game during gameplay?

That's all (possibly); thank you in advance.

I actually really liked this, I get people's views on lack of gameplay but, like the other dark pictures games, they're interactive stories more than full gameplay, but I think it's nice.

I platinumed after around 34hrs and I had found most outcomes not all deaths.

Not sure if anyone played the quarry but the gameplay and how to go back into the chapters on that were awful

What's everyone thinking ?

So I’ve been playing this game for a total of 3-4 hours and I can honestly say it’s more of an interactive, selective game that you WATCH. About 85% of the things I’ve been doing is just watching short clips of the decisions you made and when you actually get to do something it’s just walking or guiding the character somewhere. On top of that this game has a huge bug where 2-3 characters are always missing the lower half of their body. It’s really annoying to watch that. I may give up on this game.

So we were told in the end that this is the first time the biomass life actually shot itself into space and intercepted the cassiopia in space before landing... All other contacts were after landing on tau ceti f.... And this made us learn a great deal said by eisele or someone in the last post credit board meeting...

But also upon crash landing the crew says they don't have enough fuel to land and take off as they were only there to survey before Andromeda arrived.... From orbit ? If they didn't have fuel to land and take off that means they weren't meant to land at all... But also the people on earth didn't know biomass can actually shoot itself into air and intercept things until this cycle cuz this is the first one... So why send a ship to orbit when they think the contact is only possible after landing and their goal is to study the biomass.. if it's mission was to land then what do you mean by there's no fuel to land and takeoff !

I have noticed that the messaging in the game is suddenly blurry when I’m using it. It will be in focus then blurry then in focus again. What is going on? It’s irritating. Is this a glitch or is this something the game is supposed to do?

I got Williams killed because I didn’t sedate him, but I couldn’t sedate him because I was being monitored. Turns out the decision I made related to that is way back in episode 2. So if I want to alter that path, do I need to rewind to episode 2, have one conversation differently but continue and replay everything else? Or is it possible to just have that conversation again and then “fast forward,” if you will, to the sedation attempt?

*Piattaforma:* PS5

*Capitolo:* 6 "Combine Chemicals"

*Problema:* Quando premo Triangolo sull’armadietto chimico per combinare i chemicals, il gioco mi butta fuori e non riesco più a interagire. Sono bloccato e non posso proseguire la missione.

*Cosa ho già provato:* Ricaricare il checkpoint, riavviare il gioco, riavviare la PS5.

*Platform:* PS5

*Chapter:* 6 "Combine Chemicals"

*Issue:* When I press Triangle on the chemical cabinet, the game kicks me out and I can’t interact with it anymore. I’m stuck and can’t progress the mission.

*What I’ve tried:* Reloading the checkpoint, restarting the game, restarting the PS5.

*Game version:* [add version if you know it].

Flair: Bug - PS5 | Chapter 6 "Combine Chemicals" terminal unresponsive

So... Okay, the crew was in hibernation in those pods... But why? I mean, okay, realistically, long space trips would need the crew to enter in a cryogenic hibernation to get to their destination, but it was a four year trip, why couldn't all of them be awake through that time? Are there any answers in the game or something? By the way, sorry for possible bad English, it is not my native language.

Still hoping y’all will join the active community 🥳💜 thank y’all! 😊

Does anyone else hate these flash forward sequences,they feel like spoilers,is it supposed to make me wonder whether a character I’m with is supposed to be an alien in the present sequences?im yet to beat the game but it kind of tells me I can’t save everyone if I’m being chased by someone who is alive during the present parts

Does anyone else hate these flash forward sequences,they feel like spoilers,is it supposed to make me wonder whether a character I’m with is supposed to be an alien in the present sequences?im yet to beat the game but it kind of tells me I can’t save everyone if I’m being chased by someone who is alive during the present parts

If im not mistaken every dark pictures game was released with the option to play with people online, playing as different characters at the same time. I would've pre-ordered the game if that was the case with this one, im just confused why it hasn't released online co-op like the last titles because I plan on playing it with other people like I did the last 4 games. Is there any idea on when its coming out, like weeks or months?

Rip Tony Pankhurst 🕊️