- Directive 8020 creative director Will Doyle has explained why the game’s rewind feature will change how you play
- The team knows that players get invested in characters and quit after a few hours if they regret their decisions
- A traditional survival mode for purists is also included to allow players to experience the game in the classic Dark Pictures way
Supermassive Games has explained why its upcoming horror game, Directive 8020, will allow players to rewind their decisions and why it decided to offer The Dark Pictures Anthology‘s classic way of playing as an option.
In an interview with TechRadar Gaming at Gamescom 2025, creative director Will Doyle spoke more about Directive 8020‘s newly added Turning Point feature, a mechanic that will offer players a chance to rewind past decisions.
Doyle said the team is aware that, in past games like Until Dawn, players think they must stick with their decisions, will later regret them, and would rather quit the game than start over again.
“A lot of players think validly, but think very passionately, that our games have to be like ‘You must live with your decisions,'” Doyle said. “That’s what these, our, games do. So you have to go that way. But we know very, very well that many players aren’t like that, that many players get invested in a character, and then they get three or four hours into the game, and that character dies, and they turn off.
“So for all of those players, we’re saying, ‘No, you can undo, you can rewind.'”
However, Supermassive has also made sure to add a traditional survival mode for all the seasoned players who don’t mind living with their terrible choices.
“At the same time, for the other group players, we’re saying, if you want to, if you do want to live and die by your choices, we’ll play on survival mode.
“We put in the mode for you that you cannot rewind. It just removes that moves the ability to and you get an achievement for completing the game in that mode. And then at the end of that mode, when you get to the end of the story, you can turn it on…”
The developer later touched on how Directive 8020 further strays away from its predecessors with the removal of timed choices, explaining that its removal will allow players more time to think over big decisions, especially if they’re playing with friends.
“In the previous games, because we had this multiplayer, shared story mode, we didn’t want you to wait for too long, because we wanted to keep the two parts in sync. We actually find that taking away time, as for most of the choices, is better for in the room play for yourself. Just give me more time to think about it,” Doyle said.
“And when you when you’re playing, a lot of people play our games, either in what we used to call movie night mode, where it’s kind of counter play, or just with one person playing in a room, mates sitting around watching. And it really, really helps to be able to discuss those big moments…”
Directive 8020 is the fifth entry in the Dark Pictures series and arrives in 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC.
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