It’s been 22 years since The Thing released for PS2 & Xbox, which is actually longer than the time between the launch of the game and the movie that its story was based on: John Carpenter’s The Thing. When I heard that The Thing: Remastered was coming, I had to be the one to review it here.
That’s because that 1982 movie is one of my favourite films of all time. But I only discovered it — and John W. Cambpell’s Who Goes There — because of that 2002 video game. I read a preview in a magazine where they talked about the concept of a creature that could imitate things and I was captivated, although I’ve got to admit that it spun things up closer to the ‘Polymorph’ from Red Dwarf, than Carpenter’s Star Killer. Regardless of my confusion The Thing: Remastered is an excellent remastering of one of the first games where I entirely assembled and fuelled my own hype-cycle, and so reminds me of a much, much simpler time.
The original, for those who didn’t play it, was an action horror game released during the era of corridor shooters; basically A-B shooting games where you’d make your way through a level, be ambushed, win out and then rinse and repeat. What The Thing did differently, and did well, was that it didn’t go down the survival horror angle, and it brought in some very clever ‘AI’ allies that you could command, boss about, inspire and… accidentally set fire to.
There were plenty of games that came before which had squad management and ‘bossing about’ in them, although they were mostly first-person mil-sims like the Tom Clancy and Delta Force series (as well as a bunch of mech games), but The Thing offered up that ‘Trust’ was key and could be gained and lost through action and inaction. There was a genuine feeling of success when I got units through levels, and I regularly checked in on them after the fantastic, early level training on what happens when you get a couple of Things in your squad.
Except Pace and Fisk. Pace was the first squadmate who joined you out of the tutorial, he wasn’t infected when you found him, and didn’t get infected if you were careful… however, when you walked through a certain doorway he’d still turn into a Thing. As such, sadly, the best thing to do was to leave him elsewhere on the map or let him turn and then cook him up. Fisk was much later, locked in a cell in a compound, he simply disappeared mid-level when you went down an elevator. For me, both of these broke the illusion that had been painted, and — especially in the case of Pace — it happened early on.
The Thing: Remastered, much like The Thing, is an enjoyable romp through the arctic, featuring a pretty middling story and an obscene number of enemies. However, unlike The Thing, Pace and Fisk have been fixed. Mechanics like gaining trust through doing blood tests, and giving guns to unarmed soldiers (surely not very good soldiers) still feel really well thought out and underused in modern game design.
As for the remastering, everything is a little smoother, the fonts and UI are resized well for modern resolutions and — I assume — there are other fixes that aren’t apparent. Difficulty has been ramped in that allies will be more likely to become infected and turn if they’re attacked than in the original, but that’s a cost that’s well worth paying to see scripted turning scrapped.
The Thing: Remastered is available now for Windows PCs, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch.
