The Thing in deep space, from the creators of Until Dawn. Lashana Lynch leads the crew of the Cassiopeia — and not all of them are coming home on May 12
It has been four years since the last Dark Pictures game. Four years since Supermassive Games — the studio that invented the modern interactive horror genre with Until Dawn — released anything in the anthology that made their name. That wait ends on May 12. Directive 8020 arrives on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC next Tuesday, and everything we’ve seen suggests it is the most ambitious, most polished, and most terrifying game the studio has ever made.
The premise is cosmic in every sense. Earth is dying. Humanity’s last hope rests on a planet called Tau Ceti f, twelve light years from home — a potentially habitable world that the colony ship Cassiopeia has been sent to survey. The crew, led by astronaut and co-pilot Brianna Young (played by Lashana Lynch, of The Woman King and No Time to Die), crash-lands on the surface far ahead of schedule. And then — as Dark Pictures veterans will have anticipated, and as anyone who has ever watched Alien, The Thing, or Event Horizon will immediately dread — they discover they are not alone. What’s hunting them can look exactly like the people they trust. And it’s already inside.
Supermassive have been building towards this since 2022, when a post-credits teaser hidden inside The Devil in Me first revealed the sci-fi setting. Years of development, a delay from an originally planned October 2025 release, and the studio rebuilding itself on Unreal Engine 5 have all fed into what arrives next week. The ambition is evident from the first moment of every preview — the Cassiopeia is a genuinely stunning piece of environmental design, its corridors shifting from the clean functionality of a working spacecraft into something far more horrifying as grotesque alien growths spread across the walls and floors, the ship itself becoming a body horror landscape as the organism tightens its grip.
What separates Directive 8020 from every previous Dark Pictures game is the addition of real-time threat mechanics the series has never had before. Players now move through genuinely dangerous environments — dark, red-hazard-lit corridors, ventilation shafts, flooded lower decks — while actively evading alien mimics that patrol and hunt. A wrist-mounted utility strap provides a scanner to detect organic matter through walls, a wedge tool to stun enemies or force doors, a remote control to manipulate electronics as distractions, and a text messenger for crew communication. The flashlight is a double-edged asset — useful for navigation, but its beam can betray your position to creatures acutely sensitive to both light and sound. Crouching behind a cargo crate in a dimly lit bay while something wearing your colleague’s face hunts for you is, by all preview accounts, exactly as terrifying as it sounds.
The mimic mechanic is the game’s masterstroke. The alien organism doesn’t just kill — it replaces. A crew member can be silently substituted by a mimic for a significant portion of a playthrough, and players may not realise until a face texture ripples slightly wrong, or a colleague behaves in a way that doesn’t quite fit. The resulting paranoia infects every conversation, every choice, every moment of trust. Creative director Will Doyle has described Directive 8020 simply as “The Thing in deep space,” and the debt to John Carpenter’s masterpiece is worn with complete confidence. The inspirations run deep — Alien, Event Horizon, Prometheus, Solaris, Lovecraftian cosmic horror — and the result feels genuinely new despite those familiar bloodlines.
The five protagonists arrive with distinct personalities and fully voiced performances. Lynch’s Brianna Young is the central figure — a brilliant, groundbreaking astronaut whose optimism is systematically dismantled by what waits on Tau Ceti f. Alongside her are Commander Nolan Stafford (Danny Sapani), mission engineer Josef Cernan, medical specialist Samantha Cooper, and senior officer Laura Eisele — each of whom can live or die entirely based on the choices you make. The branching narrative is the most sophisticated Supermassive have ever constructed, bolstered by the new Turning Points system — a visual story tree that lets players rewind to pivotal moments rather than accepting every death as permanent. For purists, Survival Mode keeps every mistake final.
The game launches May 12 with single-player and five-player local couch co-op via the returning Movie Night mode, with online multiplayer arriving in a free post-launch update. At $49.99 it sits in an interesting price bracket — below full AAA, with a Deluxe Edition upgrade currently available free with pre-orders, adding outfit packs, cinematic filters, a digital artbook, the Jason Graves score, and an exclusive Heirlooms Retrieval mission.
Pre-launch previews have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. CBR called it “shaping up to be Supermassive’s best title yet.” Game Rant praised the cosmic and body horror execution as “beautifully gross.” The only reservation — from a GameSpot demo that found one early stealth sequence predictable — feels like exactly the kind of concern that full context and mounting stakes will dissolve. Everything else points to something special.
Six days. Board the Cassiopeia. Trust no one.
In space, death takes many forms. On May 12, it wears your face.
Dark Frights Verdict: The Dark Pictures Anthology’s most ambitious entry by a considerable margin. Real-time alien threat mechanics, Lashana Lynch anchoring a superb cast, Unreal Engine 5 body horror, and the most sophisticated branching narrative Supermassive have ever built. May 12 cannot come fast enough.