Supermassive Games' latest Dark Pictures entry drops you aboard the Cassiopeia with a crew fighting something far worse than deep space. Directive 8020 puts six characters in your hands across eight episodes, and the decisions you make from minute one shape who lives, who dies, and what kind of person each survivor turns out to be. Before you touch a single dialogue option, here's what you actually need to know.
Explore before moving on
Get your settings right before episode one
Directive 8020 is a game where missing a line of dialogue or fumbling a QTE can cost a character their life. Spend two minutes in the settings menu before the first chapter starts.
- Turn on subtitles, especially for co-op sessions or anywhere the audio is low.
- Adjust brightness so dark corridors stay dark but remain navigable. Washing out the image kills the atmosphere.
- Test your controller prompts before the action sequences arrive. Discovering you have the wrong button layout mid-chase is not the time.
Beyond that, the accessibility menu offers three QTE options worth knowing. You can remove timed decisions entirely if you want to focus on the story. The hold to complete button mash setting replaces rapid button tapping with a held press, which is much easier on your hands. The single action button option maps every QTE to one button so you never scramble across the controller at the wrong moment. None of these are cheating. They're there because Supermassive built them in.
If you are playing on the default difficulty, enemies detect you more easily during stealth sections. Easy mode gives you more room to breathe without removing any story content.
How do traits and Character Destiny actually work?
Every playable character in Directive 8020 has three traits, and two of those traits feed directly into their Character Destiny, a fate system that locks in a character's defining arc at a specific point in the story. The game checks which of the two destiny-linked traits is higher at the lock point and assigns the corresponding destiny from there.
Whenever you pick a dialogue option during a scene featuring a playable character, a Traits Altered notification appears in the top left corner of the screen. You can open the Crew menu from the pause screen at any time to see which traits just shifted and by how much.
Check traits after each choice
Here is a quick breakdown of each playable character's two destiny paths, based on TheGamer's coverage:
Carter is the tutorial character for this system. He cannot survive the main story regardless of your choices, but you can still shape his destiny in episode one when he and Simms investigate the hull breach. Stafford's destiny locks earliest among the survivors, in episode three, which matters because he can also die in that same episode.
Decide early which destiny you want for each character and stay consistent. The game can lock a destiny before you realize it's happening, and there's no prompt warning you the window is closing.
How do you build traits between story scenes?
The fastest way to push a character toward a specific destiny is through the comms device, introduced in episode two when Young is out restoring power. From that point on, optional text conversations appear whenever you control a different crew member. Most of them add context and lore, but several include dialogue choices that directly alter the current character's traits.
Check the comms every time you switch to a new character. The alerts are easy to miss if you're focused on the next waypoint. You can often lock a destiny through consistent main story choices alone, but the comms conversations give you extra pushes in the right direction and fill in backstory you won't get anywhere else.
What is the Turning Points system and when should you use it?
Turning Points is the rewind system Supermassive added to Directive 8020. From the pause menu, you can access a branching tree for each episode showing every scene you've unlocked and the decisions that led there. If a QTE goes badly or a choice produces an outcome you didn't expect, the game immediately offers to rewind you to the moment before it happened.
Here's the thing: don't always take that offer on your first playthrough.
Every consequence in Directive 8020 opens a different branch of the story. A character who gets injured unlocks scenes that a healthy character never sees. Someone who dies early changes the dynamic of every episode that follows. Playing through the consequences of your own decisions, good and bad, gives you the most complete picture of what the game actually contains.
Save the Turning Points for when you genuinely want to correct a misclick or explore a specific branch you missed. You can also use the episode trees to count how many secrets remain in a given exploration section before you move on.
One difficulty mode disables Turning Points archiving entirely. If you're on that setting, you cannot rewind at all, so treat every decision as permanent.
Turning Points tree per episode
Where are the secrets and how do you find all 50?
There are 50 secrets total hidden across the Cassiopeia, divided into seven categories: The Simms Recordings (10 videos), Cassiopeia, Cetus Mission, Conspiracy, Sleep Crew, Science Crew, and Dark Future. The Simms Recordings have their own separate icon on the Turning Points screen; everything else shares a single Secrets icon.
A few habits will stop you from missing them:
- Turn around immediately when you gain control of a new character. The game nudges you forward with waypoints, but secrets are often placed just behind the default camera angle at the handoff point.
- Look for numbers in the environment. Locked rooms and containers require codes you find by reading calendars, posters, Datapads, and other objects nearby. Our guide to Carter's PC code location covers one of the earlier examples in detail.
- Check terminals and personal spaces in every safe room before leaving. These areas hold context that changes how later decisions read.
- Some secrets are locked behind story paths where specific characters survive. If a character dies, you may permanently lose access to certain collectibles in that run.
For puzzle-specific help later in the game, the guide on how to solve the chemical agents puzzle for Anders walks through the Episode 5 sedative puzzle step by step.
How does the mimic threat change how you play?
The alien presence aboard the Cassiopeia is not just a monster. It's a trust problem. Any character who returns from an isolated section should be treated as unverified until the story gives you concrete evidence otherwise. The key signals to watch for are memory gaps, unnatural urgency, and a refusal to account for where they've been.
Practically, this means:
- Prefer group decisions over splitting characters into one-on-one situations.
- Use any evidence the game gives you before making an accusation. False accusations damage relationships and can push trait values in directions you don't want.
- Don't rush through dialogue. Small contradictions in what characters say are sometimes the only warning you get.
Should you play with multiplayer on your first run?
Directive 8020 supports up to five players, with two modes: Round Robin, where control rotates between players each time the game switches characters, and Custom, where each player is assigned a specific crew member. You need someone covering all six characters in Custom mode to proceed.
Multiplayer is genuinely chaotic in the best way. Other players will make choices you'd never make, and those decisions ripple through the story in ways a solo run never produces. The catch is that you lose direct control over characters you care about, which makes destiny management harder.
For a first run, solo gives you the clearest read on how your own decisions connect to outcomes. Multiplayer works better once you understand the system well enough to argue with your friends about what to do next.
Plan for at least two full playthroughs
No single run of Directive 8020 shows everything. The story branches based on who survives, and some endings require specific characters to be alive at specific moments. Two full playthroughs is the minimum to see the major variations, and that's before accounting for the different character destinies.
The Turning Points system means you don't have to restart from scratch every time. You can rewind to a specific episode branch and explore from there. But some content, particularly secrets tied to living characters, requires a full run with different survival outcomes to access.
For a full breakdown of what to expect when you first boot up the game, the Directive 8020 release date and what to expect guide covers the setup in detail. For everything else across all eight episodes, the full Directive 8020 guides collection has walkthroughs, secret locations, and ending breakdowns to take you through every path the Cassiopeia has to offer.