The Dark Pictures Anthology is up to its fifth horror story in the ongoing series. Supermassive creative director Will Doyle told me The Dark Pictures will go on “as long as people keep buying them,” adding that the team has a list of nearly 40 horror subgenres it’s interested in tackling in the future. But the next one, Directive 8020, is set on a spaceship, and though I expected it to play like Alien or Event Horizon, it’s actually much closer to The Thing.

“Since we made [2015’s] Until Dawn, we’ve had people saying to us, ‘Make The Thing, make The Thing!’ It fits our mechanics really well. We have multiple characters that you control. We have multiplayer components, you’re playing different characters. And we have choices. So that kind of ‘Who do you trust?’ element just fits the mechanics of the games we make.”

Doyle’s right; it’s a great fit. In the game’s multiplayer mode, each player is assigned a character or multiple characters. These characters thus become your wards, in a sense. And it’s always tough when you lose your character, yet your friends are able to press on with theirs. Typically, every one of these playable characters can live or die, so there’s long been a fun social element baked into The Dark Pictures: Who can get their people out still breathing?

But introducing a trust system adds an exciting layer to this. At my demo at Summer Game Fest Play Days, I was presented with a choice of whether to shoot a character who might be an alien masquerading as one of my crewmates. My demo was single-player, but it was clear just how much the stakes of such a decision would be raised in multiplayer.

The person controlling the suspected alien might vouch for them, but unlike a game like Among Us, where each player knows their role and may want to hide or deceive the others, here, players are in the dark. You could passionately defend your character, and maybe even save their life by getting another player to spare them from harm, only to see them reveal their true alien form and bite the head off of someone who had you dead to rights, but chose to show mercy.

This wrinkle on the series’ usual formula of interactive, horror movie-like experiences is the sort of twist that should breathe new life into a series the team wants to continue for many years to come. I’ve long said that while some Dark Pictures entries are better than others, the prospect of a new one is always exciting to me as a horror obsessive. Like a Final Destination sequel, even the bad ones are fun. Directive 8020 will have to earn accolades on more than just the merits of its deceptive monster, but the curveball to a formula I thought I’d figured out years ago is a welcome one.

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