The second season of The Dark Pictures anthology begins with Directive 8020, and in it, a gameplay element that may not be a popular feature disappears.

Directive 8020 takes a pretty hard turn, moving towards harder sci-fi and almost into the cosmic horror genre. We don’t know much about it yet, as it was unveiled at Gamescom, but a few things are certain: the main character will be Lashana Lynch (playing Brianna Young) on a spaceship called Cassiopeia. The game is inspired by body horror stories (e.g. Dead Space, The Thing), and if the setting and style have changed, we can expect some kind of evolution here as well.

The episodes of The Dark Pictures so far are not known for their gameplay, otherwise it would be hard to describe them as walking simulators. In terms of gameplay, stealth and real-time danger will certainly be present in Directive 8020, and this might be a change from something that might have been rather annoying in previous episodes: In the older episodes, there was a heart-paced mini-game that had to be completed correctly in order to play through. You had to press the buttons in time to keep your character’s heart rate at the right level or face serious consequences.

It should also be noted that the episodes of the franchise are connected by this gameplay mechanism, but this could be an opportunity for Supermassive Games to prove that they don’t want to make walkthrough simulators. It may have been better than Until Dawn’s motion-sensing controls, but something new should be done, without risking that a sci-fi story that has been seen many times before will eventually be delivered by Directive 8020.

The Dark Pictures: Anthology: Directive 8020 (that’s its full name, but no one calls it that…) will be released sometime in 2025 for PlayStation 5, Xbox series and PC, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the game using Unreal Engine 5 shows up on the Nintendo Switch successor…

Source: GameRant