Will Doyle and Dan McDonald talk about Supermassive layoffs and The Dark Pictures’ Future

Gamescom 2025 had a deeply strange vibe. Over the course of five days, over 357,000 people flooded the halls of the Kolnmesse, and developers hyped up their upcoming games behind closed doors. Business hours were spent proclaiming how awesome and big the video game industry is. But the second part of the show – the after-hours in restaurants, pubs, and bars across the city – told a different story.

Depending on what table you were at, the vibes shifted slightly. Some folks seemed to be dealing with the survivor’s guilt of being part of a team not made redundant, while other gatherings could best be described as feeling like “the violin players on the deck of the Titanic.” The mood was off. That tonal whiplash was nowhere more apparent than at my hour-long hands-on appointment and interview to see Supermassive’s Directive 8020.

Final girl

On the 22nd of July, Supermassive Games laid off 35 developers and delayed its upcoming space horror, Directive 8020, pushing the game back from its initial October 2 release and into “the first half of 2026.” Speaking to the game’s creative director, Will Doyle, and its executive producer, Dan McDonald, about the upcoming hybrid between Alien and The Thing, the two seem to carry the scars of the recent layoffs around with them.

“Obviously, there are a lot of companies going through similar stuff right now across the industry,” McDonald explained to me when I asked about how a team manages morale and continues to work after colleagues and friends have been let go. “Hopefully the industry is turning a corner, but yeah, you know, first of all, our care and attention is to the people that are affected by that process. It’s always horrible because we’re not just numbers, we are people… so we really care about the team that we’ve got working with us.”

As one of the leads on the project, who might not have had any say in staff reductions, McDonald highlights that his and Doyle’s job was to try to keep the team motivated. “In terms of keeping [the team’s] spirits up and motivated, the reception that we’ve had, at Gamescom last year [and] at the LA Play Days event we did recently, and also the reception that we’ve started getting [at Gamescom 2025] is fantastic.”

Time in the oven

While the layoffs at Supermassive and the game’s delay were announced at the same time, as executive producer, McDonald is keen to point out that these two things aren’t totally cause and effect. “The player feedback we’ve had is all phenomenal, and that’s actually why we’ve pushed the game later… [The layoffs and the delay are] not a direct result of each other. Taking the extra time is about giving us the chance to make [the game] the best it can be, to live up to the potential that we all see in it.”

McDonald takes this moment to pivot back to staff who aren’t there to see the game through this final stretch, saying, “We’ve got a resilient group of people that are all very close to each other, that we care about, and we’re just trying to make sure they feel the love and attention.” He goes on to tell me, “I was just sending them a message right now, sending pictures of some of you guys [press] playing the game, and they’re all sending me love hearts back on our teams group, because we’re all excited about the response we’re getting.”

It is worth noting just how much more time Supermassive has spent on 8020 compared to previous games. Man of Medan, Little Hope, House of Ashes, The Devil in Me, and Switchback VR all comprised the planned first season of The Dark Pictures and were released back-to-back in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 respectively. The studio also released a larger and non-Dark Pictures related game, The Quarry, in 2022.

This extra dev time is almost immediately apparent when playing the game, which feels bigger both in terms of length and ambition. Some of this is down to how they talk about it. 8020 was originally planned as the start of season 2 of The Dark Pictures, but is now a standalone Dark Pictures story. However, the biggest giveaway is in the gameplay. While dialogue choices and split-section decisions remain, 8020 has a much more of an open exploration focus, compared to almost exclusively decision-making, branching narratives of previous games.

New horrors

There are open areas to explore where you might learn useful information about how to quickly shut a door during an escape sequence or a crewmate’s log that might help you avoid certain topics. There are open stealth encounters that encourage you to use gadgets to distract the shapeshifting monsters, and the game even has a built-in auto-save to let you retry failed combat sequences or quickly change a decision if you didn’t like the result. It feels like a survival horror game has been plugged into the cinematic storytelling formula, and it largely works.

For fans of the series, this all might sound like a lot. Hell, it might not even sound like a Dark Pictures game at this point, so I asked Will Doyle how the team retained the spirit of the anthology, especially its cinematic flair. “It’s a process of iteration for sure,” says Doyle. “We break the game down into sort of discovery sections and cinematic sections. We test and refine each of the discovery sections, but then the cinematic bits go through a really extended editing process as well. And it’s just [a process of] threading that needle of trying to get the pace right through this iteration and testing.”

This process, like rewriting a script, meant that parts of the game have changed significantly over time, as Doyle explains, “Because of the new features that we’ve put in, I think it’s fair to say [Directive 8020 has] gone through a lot of iterative change along the way. We’ve really tried out different areas, different branches, because [we were] trying to find the fun of how these systems work… So it is a bigger undertaking than we’ve had before.”

The result of this iteration is that 8020 feels fresh compared to the other Dark Pictures games. While I, a fan of schlock and horror, loved the somewhat Mad Libs-style stories with similar structures, 8020 feels much more focused and contained. Less of a segment in Tales from the Crypt and more of a narrative oneshot. The demo I played started from the very beginning of the game, and unlike every other Dark Pictures games, it did not open with a soliloquy from the enigmatic Curator. Instead, the game kicks off with a song foreshadowing the events to come, and a cold open that sees two spaceship crewmates go on an ill-fated spacewalk on the outside of the Cassiopeia.

Fresh meat

This shift in direction was seen throughout the demo, not just in the fact that 8020 has more open gameplay. The whole intro takes its time a bit more, and there is time to breathe and inhabit this world. If I had one criticism for almost the entire series up until this point, it is that each game being sub-six hours to beat (first time around) led to a breakneck pacing where it was easy to miss narrative details, let alone hard to grow any attachment to the meatbags you were trying to keep alive. 8020’s pacing already feels more like a mini-series than a 90-minute romp. In fact, this was somewhat punctuated by the demo ending with an Alan Wake 2-esque musical interlude breaking up the intro from the first main chapter.

These musical breaks will feature licensed needle drops; however, the series’ composer, Jason Graves, is still scoring the game. These interludes will apparently be a recurring theme, as a way to bookend the game’s eight “episodes.” McDonald views this music as part of the way the team has kept 8020 feeling cinematic, saying, “It feels much more like a high-end TV show. You have those moments where that licensed music comes in, and it just gives it that extra little bit of shine.”

A genre for all tastes

As a horror fan, one of my favourite things about the genre is how wide-reaching and diverse it can be. Saying you “like horror movies” might mean you love no-budget 80s slashers, or heady sci-fi. It might mean you find joy in classics like The Birds, Evil Dead, or Alien that cemented staples of the genre, or you just like movies that act as meta-comentaries on the tropes those movies introduced.

That’s why I’ve always had a soft spot for The Dark Pictures. I quite honestly didn’t really like half-baked Saw traps that were so integral to The Devil In Me. The series, like horror itself, can be hit and miss for different people. However, that’s okay, because if you didn’t like folk horror of Little Hope, Supermassive has used the same tools and tech to create a wild video game cross between The Mummy, The Descent, and Zero Dark Thirty. This is something that the team also seems to value, as when I asked them if they’d ever consider returning to a particular story, or even genre, it is clearly something that they are hesitant about.

“We really find that there [are] so many different ideas we’ve got,” says Doyle, who has now acted as creative director for going on three Dark Pictures titles. “The great thing about horror is it’s a very, very broad church [when it comes to] different themes, different ideas, and we have got ideas all over the place. So we are very, very keen to explore different settings. Of course, there are elements where we’re like, ‘Ok, that works really well,’ and we like the idea of pushing back towards that.”

Doyle did slyly hint at the potential of going back to some of these worlds or connecting some of the stories more overtly, saying, “We can’t really talk about what we’re doing in the future. We kind of hint at certain things,” alluding to the loose connective tissue between the games that fans have been able to piece together. “Little Hope had this kind of funky sort of feel to it that is very rich in horror, and is a well that we could plum again. But who knows?”

This preview is based on a PS5 demo played on-site at Gamescom in Germany. The final product is subject to change.

Lex Luddy is a freelance writer and journalist. She has written for Vice, Fanbyte, PLAY Magazine, Gayming Magazine, Push Square, startmenu and more. She can be found on BlueSky @basicallilexi.bsky.social talking about Like A Dragon, Kirby, and queer representation in media.