Supermassive's The Thing Game Has a Monster Problem

Four separate hands-on previews of Directive 8020 dropped today, and every single one flags the same problem: the monster isn't scary.

That's a brutal irony for a game whose creative director Will Doyle openly told press the team was "heavily inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing, which is one of my favourite movies." The Thing works because Rob Bottin's practical effects made you feel physically ill. The creature wasn't just dangerous; it was grotesque, unpredictable, wrong in a way that burrowed into your brain. When you build an entire game around that inspiration and then your alien manifests as, in the words of one preview, "a youth in a hoodie" swinging a riot baton, you've got a disconnect that no amount of vent-crawling atmosphere can fix.

The previews aren't uniformly negative. PC Gamer's hands-on describes a tense first-person vent sequence where the camera pulls close and dark shapes shift at the edge of your vision. TheSixthAxis praised the time-jumping structure and the way patrol routes shift as you make progress. There's clearly craft here. But the praise keeps circling back to the same caveat: the central threat doesn't land. Press Start's preview put it bluntly, noting the alien "manifests as a humanoid" and "isn't exactly scary or unnerving to have someone in a hoodie, brandishing a riot baton, twitching and swinging on you like a generic city mugger." Eurogamer's piece compared the creature directly to the Girl from Resident Evil Requiem and found Directive 8020's enemy lacking in both design and menace.

Stealth That Undercuts Itself

Supermassive is pitching Directive 8020 as an evolution of its formula, adding direct-control stealth sections on top of the QTEs and branching choices the studio is known for. In theory, that should raise the stakes. In practice, previews suggest it does the opposite. Eurogamer described the stealth as "simple and dull," with a scan tool that highlights enemy positions and effectively removes the mystery of where the threat might be. Press Start echoed the concern, noting the scanner "did tend to remove the mystery of where the stalker might be." When your new gameplay mechanic actively deflates the tension your horror game depends on, something has gone sideways.

I'm a sucker for Supermassive's brand of interactive horror. House of Ashes is still one of my favourite couch co-op experiences, and I've been pulling for Directive 8020 since it was announced. But reading four previews that all independently arrive at "the monster isn't scary" has me worried. A survival horror game can survive clunky controls or uneven pacing. It cannot survive a boring creature. The Thing understood that the monster was the movie. If Supermassive understands the same thing, the sections outside this fourth-episode demo need to deliver body horror that actually disturbs, not just a humanoid figure shuffling through corridors.

Directive 8020 is set to launch next month on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. The game spans eight episodes and features a new Turning Points system that lets players rewind to key decisions, though a permadeath mode is available for anyone who wants the classic no-take-backs experience. Lashana Lynch leads the cast as pilot Brianna Young.