The Thing originally came out in 2002 and was one of several odd “games that were kind of official sequels to movies that didn’t get sequels”. It was sometimes done really well, as it happened with TRON 2.0, which is arguably a more interesting sequel than the actual sequel that followed less than a decade later. The Thing was not done well, but then again – neither was the prequel released in 2011. I have played this game on PC back when it just released and while I didn’t find it great, it held huge promise. A lot of its core mechanical ideas could support the paranoia driven action horror gameplay… it’s just that they didn’t in practice. Then I revisited the game about 13 years ago or so and my opinion on it hasn’t changed much. Now with The Thing: Remastered being the best this game ever could be (without being a different game entirely) I can safely say – it’s not a good game and could not be. But that promise I saw years ago is still there.
What is The Thing, the video game? It is a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing, the movie from 1982 a movie that is still incredible and worth watching if you haven’t already. And if you did, you would understand that making a direct sequel to it is already a somewhat pointless exercise. But the game’s story becomes even worse, introduces aspects typical for an Alien sequel, that don’t fit into what The Thing was about, and the storytelling is a complete mess. Events just happen, characters appear and disappear and you get a cameo from John Carpenter himself for absolutely no reason.
When it’s not a bad story, it’s a relatively average “of its time” third person shooter made with PS2 in mind. You’ll get lost in its submenus of weapons and items and squad members. Most of the weapons are not needed. You’re constantly bombarded with swarms of obnoxious and unfun enemies who are usually not infinite, but sometimes they are and the game will never make that distinction. Which will lead to wonderful situations where you don’t have any goals and have no clue what to do. And the solution might be to kill all seemingly infinite enemies. But sometimes it may be something else and enemies are actually infinite. Fun. Level design is atrocious and rarely makes sense. Some encounters feature disorienting and unnecessary changes of the camera angle which also screw up your controls. And nothing is every balanced, especially during boss fights.
The squad system is at least a bit interesting. You can have up to 4 people following you, each of them a specialist of a particular “class” – a medic who can heal anyone else, an engineer who is always story required to fix certain things and a soldier who just shoots guns. You can give them simple commands and give or take away weapons and ammo, which ties into one of the biggest promises of the game – the trust system. Each squad member has a health meter, a trust meter and a representation of their current psychological state. Health is self-explanatory. Psychological state, sadly, barely ever matters, but what it does is makes a squad member more and more anxious if they are consistently exposed to a certain stressful situation (i.e. standing next to a gory scene for very long). After a certain time they lock up and if not helped via a stress relieving item they kill themselves. Sounds dramatic, but in practice very hard to get unless you terrorize your squad.
Trust meter is more dynamic and decreases and increases based on your actions. Giving a character any weapon and ammo for it will increase their trust in you. Killing mutated creatures in front of them or protecting them does the same. So does the healing. Or using a blood testing item on yourself in front of them – it’s a special item the game invents to show if someone is an alien creature. But if you shoot them or take away their means of self-defence they rather quickly lose the trust and some of the characters you will meet will start at a rather low trust level, requiring you to make them trust you first. This sounds very cool as it ties into the whole paranoia aspect of the original movie – would you give resources to someone who actually will try to kill you some time later?
Issue is – it doesn’t matter. At all. Infected people don’t use guns, so if you give someone a spare shotgun, they won’t shoot you in the back. Instead, when the time comes, they will start their slow transformation into a monster that takes so long you get to burn them to death before they finish. And the weapon with the ammo you gave them simply drops to the floor, so you don’t even get to lose it. And before they transform they are as helpful as non-infected squad mates. In addition to that, if the game wants a character to suddenly “thing out” – they will, independently of if you’ve checked them with the blood test before and they’ve shown to be not infected or not. It was made slightly less obvious in several situations in Remastered release, but apparently you can get infected and transform from being hit by any monster once, so some of the most visible and easy to check spots in the game still feature this forced transformation that blatantly disregards the game’s own mechanics.
That said, Remastered version does make everything that could’ve been done better actually better. The game looks great, even by modern standards, with all of the additional layers of colour grading and reworked lighting. It sounds alright. The controls were made as good as they can be for this title, which showcases how bad menu and mechanics planning was on the highest level. Squad seems a tiny bit more useful then it used to be, though not by much and they’re still incredibly stupid. There’s a cute inclusion of different concept art and other elements about the game development (though, sadly, no behind the scenes on the cancelled sequel). There are some weird changes too, however. Like the fact that the unused ammo is no longer discarded when reloading magazines, which changes the feeling of scarcity of ammo. And also as I was playing a few systemic elements, like the ability to explode the grenades on the ground, were no longer working, but this is being addressed with patches.
But a great remastering work can’t fix what is a bad game at its core. This isn’t a Shadow Man Remastered situation, where the game already had a solid core so all the improvements are just making it even better. The Thing: Remastered is a fantastic attempt to polish a turd. I still admire what this game aspired to be, but not a single aspect of its execution is able to live up to the initial promise. And a proper game based on The Thing would need to be done differently.